Nature & Animals Quote by H. L. Mencken

Mencken’s line lands like a tossed-off insult, but it’s really a compact anatomy lesson on the academic ego. A dog doesn’t acquire fleas as a badge of honor; it picks them up as a byproduct of being alive in a certain environment. By equating a professor’s theory with parasites, Mencken isn’t arguing that ideas are worthless. He’s mocking the institutional compulsion to have one anyway, to treat a “theory” less as a tool for understanding and more as proof of professional legitimacy.

The intent is twofold: puncture reverence for the professoriate and expose how often theory functions as career hygiene. In Mencken’s world, the scholar who can’t frame everything through a Big Idea risks seeming unserious, unspecialized, unemployable. The subtext is that theory becomes a kind of contagion: once you’re in the system, you itch to interpret, classify, and generalize, sometimes beyond what the subject can honestly bear. The bite isn’t anti-intellectual; it’s anti-pretension. He’s suspicious of closed frameworks that explain too much, too neatly, and end up feeding on the very reality they claim to illuminate.

Context matters. Mencken wrote in an America where professionalized expertise was rising, universities were consolidating authority, and public life was increasingly mediated by “trained” voices. He made a career out of deflating that authority, especially when it dressed itself up as moral certainty or scientific inevitability. The genius of the aphorism is its cruelty: it reduces the lofty to the bodily, turning theory into an itch you can’t stop scratching.