An Oration delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge, August 31, 1837
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
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,
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 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 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 cotemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or rather,
each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this.
Yet hence arises a grave mischief. The sacredness which attaches to the act of creation, — the act of thought, — is
transferred to the record. The poet chanting, was felt to be a divine man: henceforth the chant is divine also. The
writer was a just and wise spirit: henceforward it is settled, the book is perfect; as love of the hero corrupts into
worship of his statue. Instantly, the book becomes noxious: the guide is a tyrant. The sluggish and perverted mind of
the multitude, slow to open to the incursions of Reason, having once so opened, having once received this book, stands
upon it, and makes an outcry, if it is disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Books are written on it by thinkers, not by Man
Thinking; by men of talent, that is, who start wrong, who set out from accepted dogmas, not from their own sight of
principles. Meek young men grow up in libraries, believing it their duty to accept the views, which Cicero, which Locke,
which Bacon, have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, and Bacon were only young men in libraries, when they wrote
these books.
Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we have the bookworm. Hence, the book-learned class, who value books, as such; not
as related to nature and the human constitution, but as making a sort of Third Estate with the world and the soul.
Hence, the restorers of readings, the emendators, the bibliomaniacs of all degrees.
Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all
means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its
attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is
the active soul. This every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although, in almost all men,
obstructed, and as yet unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates. In this action, it is
genius; not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man. In its essence, it is
progressive. The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of
genius. This is good, say they, — let us hold by this. They pin me down. They look backward and not forward. But
genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates.
Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his; — cinders and smoke there may
be, but not yet flame. There are creative manners, there are creative actions, and creative words; manners, actions,
words, that is, indicative of no custom or authority, but springing spontaneous from the mind's own sense of good and
fair.
On the other part, instead of being its own seer, let it receive from another mind its truth, though it were in torrents of
light, without periods of solitude, inquest, and self-recovery, and a fatal disservice is done. Genius is always sufficiently
the enemy of genius by over influence. The literature of every nation bear me witness. The English dramatic poets
have Shakspearized now for two hundred years.
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 it never so many times Plato's and Shakspeare'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 Shakspeare.
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 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.