"Emerson, Ralph W. - The Amereican Scholar" - читать интересную книгу автора (Emerson Ralph Waldo)

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.

Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The
planter, who is Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom
cheered by any idea of the true dignity of his ministry. He sees his
bushel and his cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into the farmer,
instead of Man on the farm. The tradesman scarcely ever gives an
ideal worth to his work, but is ridden by the routine of his craft,
and the soul is subject to dollars. The priest becomes a form; the
attorney, a statute-book; the mechanic, a machine; the sailor, a rope
of a ship.

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.

In this view of him, as Man Thinking, the theory of his office
is contained. Him nature solicits with all her placid, all her
monitory pictures; him the past instructs; him the future invites.
Is not, indeed, every man a student, and do not all things exist for
the student's behoof? And, finally, is not the true scholar the only
true master? But the old oracle said, `All things have two handles:
beware of the wrong one.' In life, too often, the scholar errs with
mankind and forfeits his privilege. Let us see him in his school,
and consider him in reference to the main influences he receives.


I. The first in time and the first in importance of the
influences upon the mind is that of nature. Every day, the sun; and,
after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the
grass grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, beholding and
beholden. The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle most
engages. He must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to
him? There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the
inexplicable continuity of this web of God, but always circular power
returning into itself. Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose
beginning, whose ending, he never can find, -- so entire, so
boundless. Far, too, as her splendors shine, system on system
shooting like rays, upward, downward, without centre, without
circumference, -- in the mass and in the particle, nature hastens to
render account of herself to the mind. Classification begins. To
the young mind, every thing is individual, stands by itself. By and
by, it finds how to join two things, and see in them one nature; then