The American Scholar

By Emerson, Ralph Waldo

Book Id: WPLBN0000631552
Format Type: PDF eBook:
File Size: 0.5 MB
Reproduction Date: 2005

Title:	The American Scholar
Author:	Emerson, Ralph Waldo
Volume:
Language:	English
Subject:	Literature, Literature & thought, Writing.
Collections:	Classic Literature Collection, Blackmask Online Collection
Historic Publication Date:
Publisher:	Blackmask Online


Citation APA MLA Chicago Waldo Emerson, B. R. (n.d.). The American Scholar. Retrieved from http://gutenberg.cc/

Description
Excerpt: THE old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man, present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state, these functions are parcelled out to individuals, each of whom aims to do his stint of the joint work, whilst each other performs his. The fable implies, that the individual, to possess himself, must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers. But unfortunately, this original unit, this fountain of power, has been so distributed to multitudes, has been so minutely subdivided and peddled out, that it is spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters, a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.

Table of Contents
Table of Contents: THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR, 1 -- Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1