Dec 16 2011
∞
“ Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The planter … The tradesman … The priest … the attorney … the mechanic … the sailor … In this distribution of functions the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state he is Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men’s thinking.
—
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “The American Scholar” (1837), in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Modern Library), 44.
