Amid such multiplicity of details he must sometimes have made
mistakes, and with his great quickness of apprehension he sometimes
formed hasty conclusions. But no one has a right to say that his great
acquirements were bought by any habitual sacrifice of thoroughness. To
say that they sometimes impaired the quality of his thought would
undoubtedly be more just; and this is a serious charge to bring.
Learning is not accumulation, but assimilation; every man's real
acquirements must pass into his own organization, and undue or hasty
nutrition does no good. The most priceless knowledge is not worth the
smallest impairing of the quality of the thinking. The scholar cannot
afford, any more than the farmer, to lavish his strength in clearing
more land than he can cultivate; and Theodore Parker was compelled by
the natural limits of time and strength to let vast tracts lie fallow,
and to miss something of the natural resources of the soil. One
sometimes wished that he had studied less and dreamed more,--for less
encyclopedic information, and more of his own rich brain.
But it was in popularizing thought and knowledge that his great and
wonderful power lay. Not an original thinker, in the same sense with
Emerson, he yet translated for tens of thousands that which Emerson
spoke to hundreds only. No matter who had been heard on any subject,
the great mass of intelligent, "progressive" New-England thinkers
waited to hear the thing summed up by Theodore Parker.
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