An address given by
Ralph Waldo Emerson to the
Phi Beta Kappa Society at
Cambridge on August 31
1837, this speech is seen as a fore-runner to
Vannevar Bush's article
As We May Think. It laid out the aims of
scholarship which
Vannevar Bush sought to aid via
automation of access to
Literature.
Because of it's date, the address is now out of copyright, so is reproduced here in full.
Mr. President and
Gentlemen,
I greet you on the re-commencement 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
contemporaries 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,
astronomers announce, shall one day be the pole-star for a
thousand years?
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 unlooked-for wisdom, that the gods, in
the beginning, divided Man into men, that he might be more
helpful to himself; just as the hand was divided into
fingers, the better to answer its
end.
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.
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 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
worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.
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.
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
contemporaries, 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 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 Shakespearized now for two
hundred years.
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 Shakespeare, only that least part, -- only the authentic
utterances of the oracle; -- all the rest he rejects, were
it never so many times Plato's and Shakespeare's.
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 year.
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 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 to-day. This is the way to learn grammar.
Colleges and books only copy the language which the field
and the work-yard made.
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 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 to-day, -- 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 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.
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
herb-woman; 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 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 to-day 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 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.
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 the leading idea may be
distinctly enough traced.
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."
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 very good one, if we but know what to do with
it.
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 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 to-day, 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
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 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 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.