"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."
...
"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?"
...
"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."
...
"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 .... 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."
...
"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."
...
"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."
...
"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 .... 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."
...
"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."
...
"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 .... 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."
...
"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
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
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."
...
"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."
...
"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."
...
"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."
...
"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."
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