with all the body and all the soul, with the blood, with the marrow of
the bones, with the heart, with the lungs, with the belly, with the
life. And the people who think only with the brain develop into
definition-mongers; they become the professionals of thought. And you
know what a professional is? You know what a product of the
differentiation of labour is?

Take a professional boxer. He has learnt to hit with such economy of
effort that, while concentrating all his strength in the blow, he only
brings into play just those muscles that are required for the immediate
and definite object of his action--to knock out his opponent. A blow
given by a non-professional will not have so much immediate, objective
efficiency; but it will more greatly vitalize the striker, causing him
to bring into play almost the whole of his body. The one is the blow of
a boxer, the other that of a man. And it is notorious that the Hercules
of the circus, the athletes of the ring, are not, as a rule, healthy.
They knock out their opponents, they lift enormous weights, but they die
of phthisis or dyspepsia.

If a philosopher is not a man, he is anything but a philosopher; he is
above all a pedant, and a pedant is a caricature of a man. The
cultivation of any branch of science--of chemistry, of physics, of
geometry, of philology--may be a work of differentiated specialization,
and even so only within very narrow limits and restrictions; but
philosophy, like poetry, is a work of integration and synthesis, or else
it is merely pseudo-philosophical erudition.

All knowledge has an ultimate object. Knowledge for the sake of
knowledge is, say what you will, nothing but a dismal begging of the
question. We learn something either for an immediate practical end, or