The American Scholar - Emerson
The American Scholar - Emerson
The American Scholar - Emerson
In this hope, I accept the topic which not only usage, but the nature of our
association, seem to prescribe to this day, ⎯ the American Scholar. Year by
year, we come up hither to read one more chapter of his biography. Let us
inquire what light new days and events have thrown on his character, and his
hopes.
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
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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.
Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things. The planter, who is
Man sent out into the field to gather food, is seldom cheered by any idea of the
true dignity of his ministry. He sees his bushel and his cart, and nothing
beyond, and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm. The tradesman
scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his work, but is ridden by the routine of
his craft, and the soul is subject to dollars. The priest becomes a form; the
attorney, a statute-book; the mechanic, a machine; the sailor, a rope of a ship.
In this view of him, as Man Thinking, the theory of his office is contained.
Him nature solicits with all her placid, all her monitory pictures; him the past
instructs; him the future invites. Is not, indeed, every man a student, and do not
all things exist for the student's behoof? And, finally, is not the true scholar the
only true master? But the old oracle said, ‘All things have two handles: beware
of the wrong one.’ In life, too often, the scholar errs with mankind and forfeits
his privilege. Let us see him in his school, and consider him in reference to the
main influences he receives.
I.
The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is
that of nature. Every day, the sun; and, after sunset, night and her stars. Ever
the winds blow; ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women,
conversing, beholding and beholden. The scholar is he of all men whom this
spectacle most engages. He must settle its value in his mind. What is nature to
him? There is never a beginning, there is never an end, to the inexplicable
continuity of this web of God, but always circular power returning into itself.
Therein it resembles his own spirit, whose beginning, whose ending, he never
can find, ⎯ so entire, so boundless. Far, too, as her splendors shine, system on
system shooting like rays, upward, downward, without centre, without
circumference, ⎯ in the mass and in the particle, nature hastens to render
account of herself to the mind. Classification begins. To the young mind,
every thing is individual, stands by itself. By and by, it finds how to join two
things, and see in them one nature; then three, then three thousand; and so,
tyrannized over by its own unifying instinct, it goes on tying things together,
diminishing anomalies, discovering roots running under ground, whereby
contrary and remote things cohere, and flower out from one stem. It presently
learns, that, since the dawn of history, there has been a constant accumulation
and classifying of facts. But what is classification but the perceiving that these
objects are not chaotic, and are not foreign, but have a law which is also a law
of the human mind? The astronomer discovers that geometry, a pure
abstraction of the human mind, is the measure of planetary motion. The
chemist finds proportions and intelligible method throughout matter; and
science is nothing but the finding of analogy, identity, in the most remote parts.
The ambitious soul sits down before each refractory fact; one after another,
reduces all strange constitutions, all new powers, to their class and their law,
and goes on for ever to animate the last fibre of organization, the outskirts of
nature, by insight.
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Thus to him, to this school-boy under the bending dome of day, is suggested,
that he and it proceed from one root; one is leaf and one is flower; relation,
sympathy, stirring in every vein. And what is that Root? Is not that the soul of
his soul? ⎯ A thought too bold, ⎯ a dream too wild. Yet when this spiritual
light shall have revealed the law of more earthly natures, ⎯ when he has
learned to worship the soul, and to see that the natural philosophy that now is,
is only the first gropings of its gigantic hand, he shall look forward to an ever
expanding knowledge as to a becoming creator. He shall see, that nature is the
opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part. One is seal, and one is print.
Its beauty is the beauty of his own mind. Its laws are the laws of his own
mind. Nature then becomes to him the measure of his attainments. So much of
nature as he is ignorant of, so much of his own mind does he not yet possess.
And, in fine, the ancient precept, “Know thyself,” and the modern precept,
“Study nature,” become at last one maxim.
II.
The next great influence into the spirit of the scholar, is, the mind of the Past,
⎯ in whatever form, whether of literature, of art, of institutions, that mind is
inscribed. Books are the best type of the influence of the past, and perhaps we
shall get at the truth, ⎯ learn the amount of this influence more conveniently,
⎯ by considering their value alone.
The theory of books is noble. The scholar of the first age received into him the
world around; brooded thereon; gave it the new arrangement of his own mind,
and uttered it again. It came into him, life; it went out from him, truth. It came
to him, short-lived actions; it went out from him, immortal thoughts. It came
to him, business; it went from him, poetry. It was dead fact; now, it is quick
thought. It can stand, and it can go. It now endures, it now flies, it now
inspires. Precisely in proportion to the depth of mind from which it issued, so
high does it soar, so long does it sing.
Or, I might say, it depends on how far the process had gone, of transmuting life
into truth. In proportion to the completeness of the distillation, so will the
purity and imperishableness of the product be. But none is quite perfect. As
no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist
entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or
write a book of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a
remote posterity, as to cotemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, it
is found, must write its own books; or rather, each generation for the next
succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.
Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which attaches to the act of
creation, ⎯ the act of thought, ⎯ is transferred to the record. The poet
chanting, was felt to be a divine man: henceforth the chant is divine also. The
writer was a just and wise spirit: henceforward it is settled, the book is perfect;
as love of the hero corrupts into worship of his statue. Instantly, the book
becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant. The sluggish and perverted mind of the
multitude, slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened,
having once received this book, stands upon it, and makes an outcry, if it is
disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not by
Man Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from
accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of principles. Meek young men
grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero,
which Locke, which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and
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Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.
Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence, the book-
learned class, who value books, as such; not as related to nature and the human
constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul.
Hence, the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all
degrees.
Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the
right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect? They are for
nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its
attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.
The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. This every man is
entitled to; this every man contains within him, although, in almost all men,
obstructed, and as yet unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters
truth, or creates. In this action, it is genius; not the privilege of here and there a
favorite, but the sound estate of every man. In its essence, it is progressive.
The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with
some past utterance of genius. This is good, say they, ⎯ let us hold by this.
They pin me down. They look backward and not forward. But genius looks
forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man
hopes: genius creates. Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, the pure
efflux of the Deity is not his; ⎯ cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet
flame. There are creative manners, there are creative actions, and creative
words; manners, actions, words, that is, indicative of no custom or authority,
but springing spontaneous from the mind's own sense of good and fair.
On the other part, instead of being its own seer, let it receive from another
mind its truth, though it were in torrents of light, without periods of solitude,
inquest, and self-recovery, and a fatal disservice is done. Genius is always
sufficiently the enemy of genius by over influence. The literature of every
nation bear me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakspearized now
for two hundred years.
It is remarkable, the character of the pleasure we derive from the best books.
They impress us with the conviction, that one nature wrote and the same reads.
We read the verses of one of the great English poets, of Chaucer, of Marvell, of
Dryden, with the most modern joy, ⎯ with a pleasure, I mean, which is in
great part caused by the abstraction of all time from their verses. There is some
awe mixed with the joy of our surprise, when this poet, who lived in some past
world, two or three hundred years ago, says that which lies close to my own
soul, that which I also had wellnigh thought and said. But for the evidence
thence afforded to the philosophical doctrine of the identity of all minds, we
should suppose some pre-established harmony, some foresight of souls that
were to be, and some preparation of stores for their future wants, like the fact
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observed in insects, who lay up food before death for the young grub they shall
never see.
III.
There goes in the world a notion, that the scholar should be a recluse, a
valetudinarian, ⎯ as unfit for any handiwork or public labor, as a penknife for
an axe. The so-called ‘practical men’ sneer at speculative men, as if, because
they speculate or see, they could do nothing. I have heard it said that the
clergy, ⎯ who are always, more universally than any other class, the scholars
of their day, ⎯ are addressed as women; that the rough, spontaneous
conversation of men they do not hear, but only a mincing and diluted speech.
They are often virtually disfranchised; and, indeed, there are advocates for their
celibacy. As far as this is true of the studious classes, it is not just and wise.
Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential. Without it, he is not
yet man. Without it, thought can never ripen into truth. Whilst the world
hangs before the eye as a cloud of beauty, we cannot even see its beauty.
Inaction is cowardice, but there can be no scholar without the heroic mind.
The preamble of thought, the transition through which it passes from the
unconscious to the conscious, is action. Only so much do I know, as I have
lived. Instantly we know whose words are loaded with life, and whose not.
The world, ⎯ this shadow of the soul, or other me, lies wide around. Its
attractions are the keys which unlock my thoughts and make me acquainted
with myself. I run eagerly into this resounding tumult. I grasp the hands of
those next me, and take my place in the ring to suffer and to work, taught by an
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instinct, that so shall the dumb abyss be vocal with speech. I pierce its order; I
dissipate its fear; I dispose of it within the circuit of my expanding life. So
much only of life as I know by experience, so much of the wilderness have I
vanquished and planted, or so far have I extended my being, my dominion. I
do not see how any man can afford, for the sake of his nerves and his nap, to
spare any action in which he can partake. It is pearls and rubies to his
discourse. Drudgery, calamity, exasperation, want, are instructers in eloquence
and wisdom. The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action past by, as a
loss of power.
It is the raw material out of which the intellect moulds her splendid products.
A strange process too, this, by which experience is converted into thought, as a
mulberry leaf is converted into satin. The manufacture goes forward at all
hours.
The actions and events of our childhood and youth, are now matters of calmest
observation. They lie like fair pictures in the air. Not so with our recent
actions, ⎯ with the business which we now have in hand. On this we are quite
unable to speculate. Our affections as yet circulate through it. We no more
feel or know it, than we feel the feet, or the hand, or the brain of our body. The
new deed is yet a part of life, ⎯ remains for a time immersed in our
unconscious life. In some contemplative hour, it detaches itself from the life
like a ripe fruit, to become a thought of the mind. Instantly, it is raised,
transfigured; the corruptible has put on incorruption. Henceforth it is an object
of beauty, however base its origin and neighborhood. Observe, too, the
impossibility of antedating this act. In its grub state, it cannot fly, it cannot
shine, it is a dull grub. But suddenly, without observation, the selfsame thing
unfurls beautiful wings, and is an angel of wisdom. So is there no fact, no
event, in our private history, which shall not, sooner or later, lose its adhesive,
inert form, and astonish us by soaring from our body into the empyrean.
Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and dogs, and
ferules, the love of little maids and berries, and many another fact that once
filled the whole sky, are gone already; friend and relative, profession and party,
town and country, nation and world, must also soar and sing.
Of course, he who has put forth his total strength in fit actions, has the richest
return of wisdom. I will not shut myself out of this globe of action, and
transplant an oak into a flower-pot, there to hunger and pine; nor trust the
revenue of some single faculty, and exhaust one vein of thought, much like
those Savoyards, who, getting their livelihood by carving shepherds,
shepherdesses, and smoking Dutchmen, for all Europe, went out one day to the
mountain to find stock, and discovered that they had whittled up the last of
their pine-trees. Authors we have, in numbers, who have written out their vein,
and who, moved by a commendable prudence, sail for Greece or Palestine,
follow the trapper into the prairie, or ramble round Algiers, to replenish their
merchantable stock.
If it were only for a vocabulary, the scholar would be covetous of action. Life
is our dictionary. Years are well spent in country labors; in town, ⎯ in the
insight into trades and manufactures; in frank intercourse with many men and
women; in science; in art; to the one end of mastering in all their facts a
language by which to illustrate and embody our perceptions. I learn
immediately from any speaker how much he has already lived, through the
poverty or the splendor of his speech. Life lies behind us as the quarry from
whence we get tiles and copestones for the masonry of today. This is the way
to learn grammar. Colleges and books only copy the language which the field
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But the final value of action, like that of books, and better than books, is, that it
is a resource. That great principle of Undulation in nature, that shows itself in
the inspiring and expiring of the breath; in desire and satiety; in the ebb and
flow of the sea; in day and night; in heat and cold; and as yet more deeply
ingrained in every atom and every fluid, is known to us under the name of
Polarity, ⎯ these “fits of easy transmission and reflection,” as Newton called
them, are the law of nature because they are the law of spirit.
The mind now thinks; now acts; and each fit reproduces the other. When the
artist has exhausted his materials, when the fancy no longer paints, when
thoughts are no longer apprehended, and books are a weariness, ⎯ he has
always the resource to live. Character is higher than intellect. Thinking is the
function. Living is the functionary. The stream retreats to its source. A great
soul will be strong to live, as well as strong to think. Does he lack organ or
medium to impart his truths? He can still fall back on this elemental force of
living them. This is a total act. Thinking is a partial act. Let the grandeur of
justice shine in his affairs. Let the beauty of affection cheer his lowly roof.
Those ‘far from fame,’ who dwell and act with him, will feel the force of his
constitution in the doings and passages of the day better than it can be
measured by any public and designed display. Time shall teach him, that the
scholar loses no hour which the man lives. Herein he unfolds the sacred germ
of his instinct, screened from influence. What is lost in seemliness is gained in
strength. Not out of those, on whom systems of education have exhausted their
culture, comes the helpful giant to destroy the old or to build the new, but out
of unhandselled savage nature, out of terrible Druids and Berserkirs, come at
last Alfred and Shakespeare.
I hear therefore with joy whatever is beginning to be said of the dignity and
necessity of labor to every citizen. There is virtue yet in the hoe and the spade,
for learned as well as for unlearned hands. And labor is everywhere welcome;
always we are invited to work; only be this limitation observed, that a man
shall not for the sake of wider activity sacrifice any opinion to the popular
judgments and modes of action.
I have now spoken of the education of the scholar by nature, by books, and by
action. It remains to say somewhat of his duties.
They are such as become Man Thinking. They may all be comprised in self-
trust. The office of the scholar is to cheer, to raise, and to guide men by
showing them facts amidst appearances. He plies the slow, unhonored, and
unpaid task of observation. Flamsteed and Herschel, in their glazed
observatories, may catalogue the stars with the praise of all men, and, the
results being splendid and useful, honor is sure. But he, in his private
observatory, cataloguing obscure and nebulous stars of the human mind, which
as yet no man has thought of as such, ⎯ watching days and months,
sometimes, for a few facts; correcting still his old records; ⎯ must relinquish
display and immediate fame. In the long period of his preparation, he must
betray often an ignorance and shiftlessness in popular arts, incurring the
disdain of the able who shoulder him aside. Long he must stammer in his
speech; often forego the living for the dead. Worse yet, he must accept, ⎯
how often! poverty and solitude. For the ease and pleasure of treading the old
road, accepting the fashions, the education, the religion of society, he takes the
cross of making his own, and, of course, the self-accusation, the faint heart, the
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frequent uncertainty and loss of time, which are the nettles and tangling vines
in the way of the self-relying and self-directed; and the state of virtual hostility
in which he seems to stand to society, and especially to educated society. For
all this loss and scorn, what offset? He is to find consolation in exercising the
highest functions of human nature. He is one, who raises himself from private
considerations, and breathes and lives on public and illustrious thoughts. He is
the world’s eye. He is the world’s heart. He is to resist the vulgar prosperity
that retrogrades ever to barbarism, by preserving and communicating heroic
sentiments, noble biographies, melodious verse, and the conclusions of history.
Whatsoever oracles the human heart, in all emergencies, in all solemn hours,
has uttered as its commentary on the world of actions, ⎯ these he shall receive
and impart. And whatsoever new verdict Reason from her inviolable seat
pronounces on the passing men and events of today, ⎯ this he shall hear and
promulgate.
These being his functions, it becomes him to feel all confidence in himself, and
to defer never to the popular cry. He and he only knows the world. The world
of any moment is the merest appearance. Some great decorum, some fetish of
a government, some ephemeral trade, or war, or man, is cried up by half
mankind and cried down by the other half, as if all depended on this particular
up or down. The odds are that the whole question is not worth the poorest
thought which the scholar has lost in listening to the controversy. Let him not
quit his belief that a popgun is a popgun, though the ancient and honorable of
the earth affirm it to be the crack of doom. In silence, in steadiness, in severe
abstraction, let him hold by himself; add observation to observation, patient of
neglect, patient of reproach; and bide his own time, ⎯ happy enough, if he can
satisfy himself alone, that this day he has seen something truly. Success treads
on every right step. For the instinct is sure, that prompts him to tell his brother
what he thinks. He then learns, that in going down into the secrets of his own
mind, he has descended into the secrets of all minds. He learns that he who has
mastered any law in his private thoughts, is master to that extent of all men
whose language he speaks, and of all into whose language his own can be
translated. The poet, in utter solitude remembering his spontaneous thoughts
and recording them, is found to have recorded that, which men in crowded
cities find true for them also. The orator distrusts at first the fitness of his frank
confessions, ⎯ his want of knowledge of the persons he addresses, ⎯ until he
finds that he is the complement of his hearers; ⎯ that they drink his words
because he fulfils for them their own nature; the deeper he dives into his
privatest, secretest presentiment, to his wonder he finds, this is the most
acceptable, most public, and universally true. The people delight in it; the
better part of every man feels, This is my music; this is myself.
In self-trust, all the virtues are comprehended. Free should the scholar be, ⎯
free and brave. Free even to the definition of freedom, “without any hindrance
that does not arise out of his own constitution.” Brave; for fear is a thing,
which a scholar by his very function puts behind him. Fear always springs
from ignorance. It is a shame to him if his tranquillity, amid dangerous times,
arise from the presumption, that, like children and women, his is a protected
class; or if he seek a temporary peace by the diversion of his thoughts from
politics or vexed questions, hiding his head like an ostrich in the flowering
bushes, peeping into microscopes, and turning rhymes, as a boy whistles to
keep his courage up. So is the danger a danger still; so is the fear worse.
Manlike let him turn and face it. Let him look into its eye and search its
nature, inspect its origin, ⎯ see the whelping of this lion, ⎯ which lies no
great way back; he will then find in himself a perfect comprehension of its
Emerson on American Scholar 9
nature and extent; he will have made his hands meet on the other side, and can
henceforth defy it, and pass on superior. The world is his, who can see through
its pretension. What deafness, what stone-blind custom, what overgrown error
you behold, is there only by sufferance, ⎯ by your sufferance. See it to be a
lie, and you have already dealt it its mortal blow.
For this self-trust, the reason is deeper than can be fathomed, ⎯ darker than
can be enlightened. I might not carry with me the feeling of my audience in
stating my own belief. But I have already shown the ground of my hope, in
adverting to the doctrine that man is one. I believe man has been wronged; he
has wronged himself. He has almost lost the light that can lead him back to his
prerogatives. Men are become of no account. Men in history, men in the world
of today are bugs, are spawn, and are called ‘the mass’ and ‘the herd.’ In a
century, in a millennium, one or two men; that is to say, ⎯ one or two
approximations to the right state of every man. All the rest behold in the hero
or the poet their own green and crude being, ⎯ ripened; yes, and are content to
be less, so that may attain to its full stature. What a testimony, ⎯ full of
grandeur, full of pity, is borne to the demands of his own nature, by the poor
clansman, the poor partisan, who rejoices in the glory of his chief. The poor
and the low find some amends to their immense moral capacity, for their
acquiescence in a political and social inferiority. They are content to be
brushed like flies from the path of a great person, so that justice shall be done
by him to that common nature which it is the dearest desire of all to see
enlarged and glorified. They sun themselves in the great man’s light, and feel
it to be their own element. They cast the dignity of man from their downtrod
selves upon the shoulders of a hero, and will perish to add one drop of blood to
make that great heart beat, those giant sinews combat and conquer. He lives
for us, and we live in him.
Men such as they are, very naturally seek money or power; and power because
it is as good as money, ⎯ the “spoils,” so called, “of office.” And why not? for
they aspire to the highest, and this, in their sleep-walking, they dream is
highest. Wake them, and they shall quit the false good, and leap to the true,
and leave governments to clerks and desks. This revolution is to be wrought
by the gradual domestication of the idea of Culture. The main enterprise of the
world for splendor, for extent, is the upbuilding of a man. Here are the
materials strown along the ground. The private life of one man shall be a more
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illustrious monarchy, ⎯ more formidable to its enemy, more sweet and serene
in its influence to its friend, than any kingdom in history. For a man, rightly
viewed, comprehendeth the particular natures of all men. Each philosopher,
each bard, each actor, has only done for me, as by a delegate, what one day I
can do for myself. The books which once we valued more than the apple of the
eye, we have quite exhausted. What is that but saying, that we have come up
with the point of view which the universal mind took through the eyes of one
scribe; we have been that man, and have passed on. First, one; then, another;
we drain all cisterns, and, waxing greater by all these supplies, we crave a
better and more abundant food. The man has never lived that can feed us ever.
The human mind cannot be enshrined in a person, who shall set a barrier on
any one side to this unbounded, unboundable empire. It is one central fire,
which, flaming now out of the lips of Etna, lightens the capes of Sicily; and,
now out of the throat of Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and vineyards of
Naples. It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars. It is one soul
which animates all men.
But I have dwelt perhaps tediously upon this abstraction of the Scholar. I
ought not to delay longer to add what I have to say, of nearer reference to the
time and to this country.
Our age is bewailed as the age of Introversion. Must that needs be evil? We, it
seems, are critical; we are embarrassed with second thoughts; we cannot enjoy
any thing for hankering to know whereof the pleasure consists; we are lined
with eyes; we see with our feet; the time is infected with Hamlet's unhappiness,
⎯ “Sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought.”
I read with joy some of the auspicious signs of the coming days, as they
glimmer already through poetry and art, through philosophy and science,
through church and state.
One of these signs is the fact that the same movement which effected the
elevation of what was called the lowest class in the state, assumed in literature
a very marked and as benign an aspect. Instead of the sublime and beautiful;
the near, the low, the common, was explored and poetized. That, which had
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been negligently trodden under foot by those who were harnessing and
provisioning themselves for long journeys into far countries, is suddenly found
to be richer than all foreign parts. The literature of the poor, the feelings of the
child, the philosophy of the street, the meaning of household life, are the topics
of the time. It is a great stride. It is a sign, ⎯ is it not? of new vigor, when the
extremities are made active, when currents of warm life run into the hands and
the feet. I ask not for the great, the remote, the romantic; what is doing in Italy
or Arabia; what is Greek art, or Provencal minstrelsy; I embrace the common, I
explore and sit at the feet of the familiar, the low. Give me insight into today,
and you may have the antique and future worlds. What would we really know
the meaning of? The meal in the firkin; the milk in the pan; the ballad in the
street; the news of the boat; the glance of the eye; the form and the gait of the
body; ⎯ show me the ultimate reason of these matters; show me the sublime
presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking, as always it does lurk, in these
suburbs and extremities of nature; let me see every trifle bristling with the
polarity that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and
the ledger, referred to the like cause by which light undulates and poets sing;
⎯ and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumber-room, but has
form and order; there is no trifle; there is no puzzle; but one design unites and
animates the farthest pinnacle and the lowest trench.
This idea has inspired the genius of Goldsmith, Burns, Cowper, and, in a newer
time, of Goethe, Wordsworth, and Carlyle. This idea they have differently
followed and with various success. In contrast with their writing, the style of
Pope, of Johnson, of Gibbon, looks cold and pedantic. This writing is blood-
warm. Man is surprised to find that things near are not less beautiful and
wondrous than things remote. The near explains the far. The drop is a small
ocean. A man is related to all nature. This perception of the worth of the
vulgar is fruitful in discoveries. Goethe, in this very thing the most modern of
the moderns, has shown us, as none ever did, the genius of the ancients.
There is one man of genius, who has done much for this philosophy of life,
whose literary value has never yet been rightly estimated; ⎯ I mean Emanuel
Swedenborg. The most imaginative of men, yet writing with the precision of a
mathematician, he endeavored to engraft a purely philosophical Ethics on the
popular Christianity of his time. Such an attempt, of course, must have
difficulty, which no genius could surmount. But he saw and showed the
connection between nature and the affections of the soul. He pierced the
emblematic or spiritual character of the visible, audible, tangible world.
Especially did his shade-loving muse hover over and interpret the lower parts
of nature; he showed the mysterious bond that allies moral evil to the foul
material forms, and has given in epical parables a theory of isanity, of beasts,
of unclean and fearful things.
Another sign of our times, also marked by an analogous political movement, is,
the new importance given to the single person. Every thing that tends to
insulate the individual, ⎯ to surround him with barriers of natural respect, so
that each man shall feel the world is his, and man shall treat with man as a
sovereign state with a sovereign state; ⎯ tends to true union as well as
greatness. “I learned,” said the melancholy Pestalozzi, “that no man in God's
wide earth is either willing or able to help any other man.” Help must come
from the bosom alone. The scholar is that man who must take up into himself
all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the
future. He must be a university of knowledges. If there be one lesson more
than another, which should pierce his ear, it is, The world is nothing, the man is
Emerson on American Scholar 12
all; in yourself is the law of all nature, and you know not yet how a globule of
sap ascends; in yourself slumbers the whole of Reason; it is for you to know
all, it is for you to dare all. Mr. President and Gentlemen, this confidence in
the unsearched might of man belongs, by all motives, by all prophecy, by all
preparation, to the American Scholar. We have listened too long to the courtly
muses of Europe. The spirit of the American freeman is already suspected to
be timid, imitative, tame. Public and private avarice make the air we breathe
thick and fat. The scholar is decent, indolent, complaisant. See already the
tragic consequence. The mind of this country, taught to aim at low objects,
eats upon itself. There is no work for any but the decorous and the
complaisant. Young men of the fairest promise, who begin life upon our
shores, inflated by the mountain winds, shined upon by all the stars of God,
find the earth below not in unison with these, ⎯ but are hindered from action
by the disgust which the principles on which business is managed inspire, and
turn drudges, or die of disgust, ⎯ some of them suicides. What is the remedy?
They did not yet see, and thousands of young men as hopeful now crowding to
the barriers for the career, do not yet see, that, if the single man plant himself
indomitably on his instincts, and there abide, the huge world will come round
to him. Patience, ⎯ patience; ⎯ with the shades of all the good and great for
company; and for solace, the perspective of your own infinite life; and for
work, the study and the communication of principles, the making those
instincts prevalent, the conversion of the world. Is it not the chief disgrace in
the world, not to be a unit; ⎯ not to be reckoned one character; ⎯ not to yield
that peculiar fruit which each man was created to bear, but to be reckoned in
the gross, in the hundred, or the thousand, of the party, the section, to which we
belong; and our opinion predicted geographically, as the north, or the south?
Not so, brothers and friends, ⎯ please God, ours shall not be so. We will walk
on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own
minds. The study of letters shall be no longer a name for pity, for doubt, and
for sensual indulgence. The dread of man and the love of man shall be a wall
of defense and a wreath of joy around all. A nation of men will for the first
time exist, because each believes himself inspired by the Divine Soul which
also inspires all men.
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