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The American Scholar
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 recommencement of our
literary year. Our anniversary is one of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of
labor. We do not meet for games of strength 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 contemporaries 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.
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