“ 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. ”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The American Scholar (1838). copy citation
| Author | Ralph Waldo Emerson |
|---|---|
| Source | The American Scholar |
| Topic | soldier priest |
| Date | 1838 |
| Language | English |
| Reference | |
| Note | |
| Weblink | https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_American_Scholar |
Context
“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.”
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