~Archives~
August 31, 1837
An oration delivered before
the
Phi Beta Kappa Society,
at Cambridge University
by Ralph Waldo Emerson, published in the American
Scholar Magazine
(Essay contains 7,558 worrds.)
CAMBRIDGE,
Mass. -- 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.
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.
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.
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.
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 discussion 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.
[Editor's Note: An Oration delivered
before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, at Cambridge.]
Comment
© Copyright 1846-2004 Graphics By The California
Star Newspaper.
All rights reserved.
|
CLOVIS
-- In this memoir I will attempt to express
certain American principles and attitudes with which
I came into contact as a child growing up in the
State of Missouri, the South they called
the “Midwest”.
