Ralph Waldo Emerson - Essays

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THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR.

This address was delivered at Cambridge in 1837, before the
Harvard Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society, a college
fraternity composed of the first twenty-five men in each
graduating class. The society has annual meetings, which
have been the occasion for addresses from the most
distinguished scholars and thinkers of the day.

MR. PRESIDENT AND GENTLEMEN,

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[1] or skill, for the recitation of
histories, tragedies, and odes, like the ancient Greeks; for
parliaments of love and poesy, like the Troubadours;[2] nor for the
advancement of science, like our co-temporaries 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.[3] 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[4] for a thousand years?

In the light of 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 new lights, new
events, and more days have thrown on his character, his duties, 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.[5]

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[6] 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[7] 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 the 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 whole theory of his office
is contained. Him Nature solicits with all her placid, all her
monitory pictures.[8] 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 as the old oracle said, "All things have two handles:
Beware of the wrong one."[9] 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;[10] and, after sunset,
Night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. Every
day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden.[11] The scholar
must needs stand wistful and admiring before this great spectacle. 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.[12]
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
center, 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 everything 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 forever to
animate the last fiber 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.[13] 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,"[14] 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.[15] 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,[16] 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 instantly 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.[17] The guide is a tyrant. We sought a brother, and lo, a
governor. The sluggish and perverted mind of the multitude, always
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,[18] which
Bacon,[19] 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[20]
with the world and soul. Hence the restorers of readings,[21] the
emendators,[22] the bibliomaniacs[23] of all degrees. This is bad;
this is worse than it seems.

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.[24] 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,--the soul, free, sovereign, active. 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.[25] 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.[26] They look backward and not forward. But
genius always looks forward. The eyes of man are set in his forehead,
not in his hindhead. Man hopes. Genius creates. To create,--to
create,--is the proof of a divine presence. Whatever talents may be,
if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not
his;[27]--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
always from another mind its truth, though it were in torrents of
light, without periods of solitude, inquest, and self-recovery; and a
fatal disservice[28] is done. Genius is always sufficiently the enemy
of genius by over-influence.[29] The literature of every nation bear
me witness. The English dramatic poets have Shakespearized now for two
hundred years.[30]

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.[31] But when the intervals of darkness come, as come
they must,--when the soul seeth not, 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.[32] 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 ever with the conviction that one nature
wrote and the same reads. We read the verses of one of the great
English poets, of Chaucer,[33] of Marvell,[34] of Dryden,[35] 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 well-nigh 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
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[36] 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[37] and
pecuniary foundations,[38] though of towns of gold, can never
countervail the least sentence or syllable of wit.[39] 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,[40]--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[41] 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[42] 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 launch 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[43] be vocal with speech. I pierce its order; I dissipate its
fear;[44] 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 instructors in eloquence and wisdom. The true scholar
grudges every opportunity of action passed by, as a loss of power.

It is the raw material out of which the intellect molds her splendid
products. A strange process too, this by which experience is converted
into thought, as a mulberry-leaf is converted into satin.[45] 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,[46] to become a thought of the mind. Instantly it is raised,
transfigured; the corruptible has put on incorruption.[47] 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.[48]
Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and dogs,
and ferules,[49] 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.[50]

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,[51] 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.[52] 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[53] 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 truth? 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[54] savage nature; out of
terrible Druids[55] and Berserkers[56] come at last Alfred[57] 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,[58] 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[59] and
Herschel,[60] 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[61] 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.

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