Difficult Passage by Ralph Waldo Emerson "The American Scholar"

The old fable covers a doctrine ever new and sublime; that there is One Man,--present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty; and that you must take the whole society to find the whole man. Man is not a farmer, or a professor, or an engineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and scholar, and statesman, and producer, and soldier. In the divided or social state, these functions are parceled 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.


I believe that this passage is quite difficult to understsand and interpret because in the first sentence Emerson states that the doctrine was "ever new and sublime."  From my previous studies I knew that the sublime was considered an unexpected beauty, or surprise of a good occasion.  However, i also knew that the sublime was also something to be feared and it could lead to disaster.  I find that this word alone leads the readers into a cliff hanger of this speech