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The Problem Of The Scholar`s World
The Problem Of The Scholar`s World
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 pen-knife
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 disenfranchised; 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
instructors in eloquence and wisdom. The true scholar grudges every
opportunity of action passed 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 other 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 convetous 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 cope-stones 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 workyard 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 Shakespeare.
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 off-set? 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 tranquility, 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 anything 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 strewn 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 anything 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 of the auspicious signs of the coming days, as they
glimmer already through poetry and art, through philosophy and science,
through charch and state.
One of these signs is the fact that the same movement which affected 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 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 t e polarity
that ranges it instantly on an eternal law; and the shop, the plough, and the
ledger, 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 insanity, 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. Everything 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 a 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 a 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.
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