Emerson stands before a college audience and says the long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands is drawing to a close. The millions rushing into life around him, he says, cannot always be fed on the sere remains of foreign harvests. He takes the topic the day prescribes, the American Scholar, and begins with a fable. The gods once divided Man into men, as the hand is divided into fingers, and now each of us holds one finger's work. The planter sees only his bushel and his cart and sinks into the farmer, instead of Man on the farm. The scholar, who should be Man Thinking, shrinks into a mere thinker, or worse, the parrot of other men's thinking.
Three influences make the scholar. Nature comes first. Every day the sun, every night the stars, the winds always blowing and the grass always growing, until the student under the bending dome of day sees that he and nature grow from one root, and that the law of the mind and the law of things are one. Books come second, and they are the greater danger. The first writer took in the world, brooded on it and gave it back as truth. But the sacredness of that act passes to the record, the book is declared perfect, and instead of Man Thinking we get the bookworm. Emerson does not throw books out. They are for inspiration, and he would rather never see a book than be warped out of his own orbit and made a satellite instead of a system. A right way of reading exists if it is sternly subordinated, and colleges serve best when they aim to create, not to drill.
Action is the third influence, and the one the so-called practical men think the scholar cannot understand. Emerson answers that experience is the raw material of thought, turned into wisdom the way a mulberry leaf is turned into satin. Our childhood deeds lie like pictures in the air, but the business in our hands today cannot yet be observed, because our affections still run through it. Life is our dictionary. When the artist has used up his materials and books become a weariness, he always has the resource to live. Character is higher than intellect.
The scholar's duties are all contained in self-trust. His task is slow, unhonoured and unpaid: to show people facts amid appearances, as the astronomers Flamsteed and Herschel catalogue stars from their glazed observatories. He must never defer to the popular cry, because the world of any moment is the merest appearance. Emerson names his own age the age of Introversion, lined with eyes and sick with Hamlet's pale cast of thought, and asks whether that must be an evil. Sight, he says, is the last thing to be pitied. He reads good signs in writers who look at the near, the low and the common, and in the new weight given to the single person. The address ends on its own refrain: we will walk on our own feet, we will work with our own hands, we will speak our own minds.
