Indeed, there has probably not been anyone since Goethe who could plausibly lay claim to knowing everything there was to know at a particular time. And yet, in accepting the impossibility of universal knowledge in our own day, we must be careful not to dismiss those who attempt to be genuinely broad and versatile thinkers - the decathlon athletes of contemporary thought. I think it is important that we try. We must reaffirm the unity of the university in relation to its intellectual core, and encourage the reunification of the parts of that core, even within the reality of an explosive expansion in knowledge. Man is not simply a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all these.
Man is also 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. 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. The One Man was, in the Emersonian vision, in need of being gathered back into his single transcendent identity.