EMERSON...EXCERPT

"Asked to preach at his old church, [Ralph Waldo] Emerson used the occasion to signal his change of direction... 'The end of being is to know; and if you say the end of knowledge is action, -- why, yes, but the end of action again, is knowledge.'... He told his hearers that this point of view revived old Stoic maxims and precepts. Emerson made a little sequence of them, beginning with 'KNOW THYSELF.'... That realization leads in turn to the injunction 'REVERE THYSELF.'... "Though he was no scientist, he was extremely interested in the mind of the scientist and in the meaning of science for modern life. In 1793 Thomas Paine had said.., 'science is the true theology' because it is the study of the power and works of God. Emerson now recalled that Bacon had also said that 'man is the minister and interpreter of nature' and that we are intended 'not only to explain the sense of each passage but the scope and argument of the whole book [of nature].'" P.153, EMERSON A MIND ON FIRE, by Robert D. Richardson, Jr. (1995)