Essays by Ralph Waldo Emerson
"If the force of Emerson's character was thus inextricably blended
with the force of all his faculties of intellect and imagination, and
the refinement of all his sentiments, we have still to account for the
peculiarities of his genius, and to answer the question, why do we
instinctively apply the epithet 'Emersonian' to every characteristic
passage in his writings? We are told that he was the last in a long
line of clergymen, his ancestors, and that the modern doctrine of
heredity accounts for the impressive emphasis he laid on the moral
sentiment; but that does not solve the puzzle why he unmistakably
differed in his nature and genius from all other Emersons. An
imaginary genealogical chart of descent connecting him with Confucius
or Gautama would be more satisfactory.
"What distinguishes _the_ Emerson was his exceptional genius and
character, that something in him which separated him from all other
Emersons, as it separated him from all other eminent men of letters,
and impressed every intelligent reader with the feeling that he was
not only 'original but aboriginal.' Some traits of his mind and
character may be traced back to his ancestors, but what doctrine of
heredity can give us the genesis of his genius? Indeed, the safest
course to pursue is to quote his own words, and despairingly confess
that it is the nature of genius 'to spring, like the rainbow daughter
of Wonder, from the invisible, to abolish the past, and refuse all
history.'"
CHRONOLOGICAL LIST OF EMERSON'S PRINCIPAL WORKS.
Nature 1836
Essays (First Series) 1841
Essays (Second Series) 1844
Poems 1847
Miscellanies 1849
Representative Men 1850
English Traits 1856
Conduct of Life 1860
Society and Solitude 1870
Correspondence of Thomas
Carlyle and R.W. Emerson 1883
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