THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR
_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 ...
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