doctrine that there is One Man; present to individuals only in a partial
manner; and that we must take the whole of society to find the whole
man. Unfortunately the unit has been too minutely subdivided, and many
faculties are practically lost for want of use. "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 priest becomes a form; the attorney a statute
book; the mechanic a machine; the sailor a rope of the ship."

This complaint is by no means a new one. Scaliger says, as quoted
by omnivorous old Burton: "_Nequaquam, nos homines sumus sed partes
hominis_." The old illustration of this used to be found in pin-making.
It took twenty different workmen to make a pin, beginning with drawing
the wire and ending with sticking in the paper. Each expert, skilled
in one small performance only, was reduced to a minute fraction of a
fraction of humanity. If the complaint was legitimate in Scaliger's
time, it was better founded half a century ago when Mr. Emerson found
cause for it. It has still more serious significance to-day, when
in every profession, in every branch of human knowledge, special
acquirements, special skill have greatly tended to limit the range of
men's thoughts and working faculties.

"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
continued. Him Nature solicits with all her placid, all her monitory
pictures; him the past instructs; him the future invites."