Contents:

Page No 1

Page No 2

Page No 3

Page No 4

THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR ..........................................................................................................................1

Ralph Waldo Emerson.............................................................................................................................1

I greet you on the recommencement of our literary year. Our anniversary is one of hope, and, perhaps, not

enough of labor. We do not meet for games of strength or skill, for the recitation of histories, tragedies, and

odes, like the ancient Greeks; for parliaments of love and poesy, like the Troubadours; nor for the

advancement of science, like our cotemporaries in the British and European capitals. Thus far, our holiday

has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to

letters any more. As such, it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct. Perhaps the time is already

come, when it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look

from under its iron lids, and fill the postponed expectation of the world with something better than the

exertions of mechanical skill. Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands,

draws to a close. The millions, that around us are rushing into life, cannot always be fed on the sere remains

of foreign harvests. Events, actions arise, that must be sung, that will sing themselves. Who can doubt, that

poetry will revive and lead in a new age, as the star in the constellation Harp, which now flames in our zenith,

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.

It is one of those fables, which, out of an unknown antiquity, convey an unlookedfor wisdom, that the gods,

in the beginning, divided Man into men, that he might be more helpful to himself; just as the hand was

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 parcelled 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

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 statutebook; the mechanic, a machine; the sailor, a rope of a ship.

In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, _Man

Thinking_. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still

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

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

Thus to him, to this schoolboy 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

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

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, shortlived 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,

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 airpump 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

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 Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote these books.

Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence, the booklearned 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 selfrecovery, 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.

Undoubtedly there is a right way of reading, so it be sternly subordinated. Man Thinking must not be subdued

by his instruments. Books are for the scholar's idle times. When he can read God directly, the hour is too

precious to be wasted in other men's transcripts of their readings. But when the intervals of darkness come, as

come they must, when the sun is hid, and the stars withdraw their shining, we repair to the lamps

which were kindled by their ray, to guide our steps to the East again, where the dawn is. We hear, that we

may speak. The Arabian proverb says, "A fig tree, looking on a fig tree, becometh fruitful."

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 preestablished harmony,

some foresight of souls that were to be, and some preparation of stores for their future wants, like the fact

observed in insects, who lay up food before death for the young grub they shall never see.

I would not be hurried by any love of system, by any exaggeration of instincts, to underrate the Book. We all

know, that, as the human body can be nourished on any food, though it were boiled grass and the broth of

shoes, so the human mind can be fed by any knowledge. And great and heroic men have existed, who had

almost no other information than by the printed page. I only would say, that it needs a strong head to bear that

diet. One must be an inventor to read well. As the proverb says, "He that would bring home the wealth of the

Indies, must carry out the wealth of the Indies." There is then creative reading as well as creative writing.

When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with

manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.

We then see, what is always true, that, as the seer's hour of vision is short and rare among heavy days and

months, so is its record, perchance, the least part of his volume. The discerning will read, in his Plato or

Shakspeare, only that least part, only the authentic utterances of the oracle; all the rest he rejects, were

Of course, there is a portion of reading quite indispensable to a wise man. History and exact science he must

learn by laborious reading. Colleges, in like manner, have their indispensable office, to teach elements.

But they can only highly serve us, when they aim not to drill, but to create; when they gather from far every

ray of various genius to their hospitable halls, and, by the concentrated fires, set the hearts of their youth on

flame. Thought and knowledge are natures in which apparatus and pretension avail nothing. Gowns, and

pecuniary foundations, though of towns of gold, can never countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit.

Forget this, and our American colleges will recede in their public importance, whilst they grow richer every

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 socalled `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

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 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

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

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

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 flowerpot, 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

pinetrees. 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

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

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

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

They are such as become Man Thinking. They may all be comprised in selftrust. 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 selfaccusation, the faint

heart, the frequent uncertainty and loss of time, which are the nettles and tangling vines in the way of the

selfrelying and selfdirected; 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

In selftrust, 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 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 stoneblind

custom, what overgrown error you behold, is there only by sufferance, by your sufferance. See it to be a

Yes, we are the cowed, we the trustless. It is a mischievous notion that we are come late into nature; that

the world was finished a long time ago. As the world was plastic and fluid in the hands of God, so it is ever to

so much of his attributes as we bring to it. To ignorance and sin, it is flint. They adapt themselves to it as they

may; but in proportion as a man has any thing in him divine, the firmament flows before him and takes his

signet and form. Not he is great who can alter matter, but he who can alter my state of mind. They are the

kings of the world who give the color of their present thought to all nature and all art, and persuade men by

the cheerful serenity of their carrying the matter, that this thing which they do, is the apple which the ages

have desired to pluck, now at last ripe, and inviting nations to the harvest. The great man makes the great

thing. Wherever Macdonald sits, there is the head of the table. Linnaeus makes botany the most alluring of

studies, and wins it from the farmer and the herbwoman; Davy, chemistry; and Cuvier, fossils. The day is

always his, who works in it with serenity and great aims. The unstable estimates of men crowd to him whose

mind is filled with a truth, as the heaped waves of the Atlantic follow the moon.

For this selftrust, 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

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 sleepwalking,

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 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

But I have dwelt perhaps tediously upon this abstraction of the Scholar. I ought not to delay longer to add

Historically, there is thought to be a difference in the ideas which predominate over successive epochs, and

there are data for marking the genius of the Classic, of the Romantic, and now of the Reflective or

Philosophical age. With the views I have intimated of the oneness or the identity of the mind through all

individuals, I do not much dwell on these differences. In fact, I believe each individual passes through all

three. The boy is a Greek; the youth, romantic; the adult, reflective. I deny not, however, that a revolution in

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,

Is it so bad then? Sight is the last thing to be pitied. Would we be blind? Do we fear lest we should outsee

nature and God, and drink truth dry? I look upon the discontent of the literary class, as a mere announcement

of the fact, that they find themselves not in the state of mind of their fathers, and regret the coming state as

untried; as a boy dreads the water before he has learned that he can swim. If there is any period one would

desire to be born in, is it not the age of Revolution; when the old and the new stand side by side, and

admit of being compared; when the energies of all men are searched by fear and by hope; when the historic

glories of the old, can be compensated by the rich possibilities of the new era? This time, like all times, is a

I read with joy some of the auspicious signs of the coming days, as they glimmer already through poetry and

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 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 leger, referred to the like cause by which light undulates and

poets sing; and the world lies no longer a dull miscellany and lumberroom, 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 bloodwarm.

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

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 shadeloving

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

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 an 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 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 an 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 defence 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.