Emerson in ‘The American Scholar,’ worrying about the increasing specialization of human enterprises, thought that the individual, to be whole, ‘must sometimes return from his own labor to embrace all the other laborers’ – a solution that he acknowledged to be impossible. The result, he saw, was that ‘man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things.’ The solution that he apparently did think possible was a return out of specialization and separateness to the human definition, so that a thinker or scholar would not be a ‘mere thinker,’ a thinking specialist, but ‘Man Thinking.’ But
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