it is not to be learned by any addition or subtraction or other comparison of known quantities, but is arrived at by untaught sallies of the spirit, by a continual self-recovery, and by entire humility. He will perceive that there are far more excellent qualities in the student than preciseness and infallibility; that a guess is often more fruitful than an indisputable affirmation, and that a dream may let us deeper into the secret of nature than a hundred concerted experi ments. flow; Nothing we see, but means our good, "The stars have us to bed: Night draws the curtain; which the sun withdraws. "More servants wait on man He treads down that which doth befriend him For, the problems to be solved are precisely those which the physiologist and the naturalist omit to state. It is not so pertinent to man to know all the individuals of the animal kingdom, as it is to know whence and whereto is this tyrannizing unity in his constitution, which evermore separates and classifies things, endeavouring to reduce the most diverse to one form. When I behold a rich landscape, it is less to my purpose to recite correctly the order and superposition of the strata, than to know why all thought of multitude is lost in a tranquil sense of unity. I cannot greatly honour The perception of this class of truths minuteness in details, so long as there is no makes the attraction which draws men to hint to explain the relation between things science, but the end is lost sight of in attenand thoughts; no ray upon the Metaphysics tion to the means. In view of this halfof conchology, of botany, of the arts, to show sight of science, we accept the sentence of the relation of the forms of flowers, shells, Plato, that, "poetry comes nearer to vital animals, architecture, to the mind, and build truth than history." Every surmise and science upon ideas. In a cabinet of natural vaticination of the mind is entitled to a history, we become sensible of a certain occult certain respect, and we learn to prefer inrecognition and sympathy in regard to the perfect theories, and sentences, which conmost unwieldy and eccentric forms of beast, tain glimpses of truth, to digested systems fish, and insect. The American who has which have no one valuable suggestion. A been confined, in his own country, to the wise writer will feel that the ends of study sight of buildings designed after foreign and composition are best answered by anmodels, is surprised on entering York Min-nouncing undiscovered regions of thought, ster or St. Peter's at Rome, by the feeling that these structures are imitations also, faint copies of an invisible archetype. Nor has science sufficient humanity, so long as the naturalist overlooks that wonderful congruity which subsists between man and the world; of which he is lord, not because he is the most subtile inhabitant, but because he is its head and heart, and finds something of himself in every great and small thing, in every mountain stratum, in every new law of colour, fact of astronomy, or atmospheric influence which observation or analysis lay open. A perception of this mystery inspires the muse of George Herbert, the beautiful psalmist of the seventeenth century. The following lines are part of his little poem on Man: "Man is all symmetry, Full of proportions, one limb to another, Each part may call the farthest, brother; and so communicating, through hope, new activity to the torpid spirit. I shall therefore conclude this essay with some traditions of man and nature, which a certain poet sang to me; and which, as they have always been in the world, and perhaps reappear to every bard, may be both history and prophecy. "The foundations of man are not in matter but in spirit. But the element of spirit eternity. To it, therefore, the longest series of events, the oldest chronologies, are young and recent. In the cycle of the univers man, from whom the known individuals proceed, centuries are points, and all history is but the epoch of one degradation. "We distrust and deny inwardly our sym pathy with nature. We own and disown our relation to it, by turns. We are, hke Nebuchadnezzar, dethroned, bereft of reason, and eating grass like an ox. But who can set limits to the remedial force of spirit? "A man is a god in ruins. When men are innocent, life shall be longer, and shall pass into the immortal, as gently as we awake from dreams. Now, the world would be insane and rabid, if these disorganizations should last for hundreds of years. It is kept in check by death and infancy. Infancy is the perpetual Messiah, which comes into the arms of fallen men, and pleads with them to return to paradise. "Man is the dwarf of himself. Once he was permeated and dissolved by spirit. He filled nature with his overflowing currents. Out from him sprang the sun and moon; from man, the sun; from woman, the moon. The laws of his mind, the periods of his actions, externized themselves into day and night, into the year and the seasons. But, having made for himself this huge shell, his waters retired; he no longer fills the veins and veinlets; he is shrunk to a drop. He sees that the structure still fits him, but fits him colossally. Say, rather, once it fitted him, now it corresponds to him from far and on high. He adores timidly his own work. Now is man the follower of the sun, and woman the follower of the moon. Yet sometimes he starts in his slumber, and wonders at himself and his house, and muses strangely at the resemblace betwixt him and it. He perceives that if his law is still paramount, if still he have elemental power, if his word is sterling yet in nature, it is not conscious power, it is not inferior but superior to his will. It is Instinct." Thus my Orphic poet sang. the abolition of the Slave-trade; the miracles of enthusiasm, as those reported of Swedenborg, Hohenlohe, and the Shakers; many obscure and yet contested facts, now arranged under the name of Animal Magnetism; prayer; eloquence; self-healing; and the wisdom of children. These are examples of Reason's momentary grasp of the sceptre; the exertions of a power which exists not in time or space, but an instantaneous in-streaming causing power. The difference between the actual and the ideal force of man is happily figured by the schoolmen, in saying, that the knowledge of man is an evening knowledge, vespertina cognitio, but that of God is a morning knowledge, matutina cognitio. The problem of restoring to the world original and eternal beauty is solved by the redemption of the soul. The ruin or the blank, that we see when we look at nature, is in our own eye. The axis of vision is not coincident with the axis of things, and so they appear not transparent but opaque. The reason why the world lacks unity, and lies broken and in heaps, is, because man is disunited with himself. He cannot be a naturalist, until he satisfies all the demands of the spirit. Love is as much its demand, as perception. Indeed, neither can be perfect without the other. In the uttermost meaning of the words, thought is devout, and devotion is thought. Deep calls unto deep. But in actual life, the marriage is not celebrated. There are innocent men who worship God after the tradition of their fathers, but their sense of duty has not yet extended to the use of all their faculties. And there are patient naturalists, but they freeze their subject under the wintry light of the understanding. Is not prayer also a study of truth,-a sally of the soul into the unfound infinite? No man ever prayed heartily, without learning something. But when a faithful thinker, resolute to detach every object from personal relations, and see it in the light of thought, shall, at the same time, kindle science with the fire of the holiest affections, then will God go forth anew into the creation. At present, man applies to nature but half his force. He works on the world with his understanding alone. He lives in it, and masters it by a penny-wisdom; and he that works most in it, is but a half-man, and, whilst his arms are strong and his digestion good, his mind is imbruted, and he is a selfish savage. His relation to nature, his power over it, is through the understanding: as, by manure; the economic use of fire, wind, water, and the mariner's needle; steam, coal, chemical agriculture; the repairs of the human body by the dentist and the surgeon. This is such a resumption of power, as if a banished king should It will not need, when the mind is prebuy his territories inch by inch, instead of pared for study, to search for objects. The vaulting at once into his throne. Meantime, invariable mark of wisdom is to see the in the thick darkness, there are not wanting miraculous in the common. What is a gleams of a better light,-occasional ex- day? What is a year? What is summer? amples of the action of man upon nature What is woman? What is a child? What with his entire force,-with reason as well is sleep? To our blindness, these things as understanding. Such examples are: the seem unaffecting. We make fables to hide traditions of miracles in the earliest antiquity the baldness of the fact and conform of all nations; the history of Jesus Christ; it, as the achievements of a principle, as in But religious and political revolutions, and in of an we say, to the higher law of the mind. when the fact is seen under the light idea, the gaudy fable fades and shrivels. We behold the real higher law. | dream of God,—he shall enter without mor To the wise, therefore, a fact is true poetry, wonder than the blind man feels who is and the most beautiful of fables. These gradually restored to perfect sight. ́ wonders are brought to our own door. You also are a man. Man and woman, and their social life, poverty, labour, sleep, fear, fortune, are known to you. Learn that none of these things is superficial, but that each phenomenon has its roots in the faculties and affections of the mind. Whilst the abstract question occupies your intellect, nature brings it in the concrete to be solved by your hands. It were a wise inquiry for the closet, to compare, point by point, especially at remarkable crises in life, our daily history, with the rise and progress of ideas in the mind. So shall we come to look at the world with new eyes. It shall answer the endless inquiry of the intellect, -What is truth? and of the affections,-What is good? by yielding itself passive to the educated Will. Then shall come to pass what my poet said: "Nature is not fixed but fluid. Spirit alters, moulds, makes it. The immobility or bruteness of nature, is the absence of spirit; to pure spirit, it is fluid, it is volatile, it is obedient. Every spirit builds itself a house; and beyond its house a world; and beyond its world a heaven. Know then, that the world exists for you. For you is the phenomenon perfect. What we are, that only can we see. All that Adam had, all that Cæsar could, you have and can do. Adam called his house, heaven and earth; Cæsar called his house, Rome; you perhaps call yours, a cobbler's trade; a hundred acres of ploughed land; or a scholar's garret. Yet line for line and point for point, your dominion is as great as theirs, though without fine names. Build, therefore, your own world. As fast as you conform your life to the pure idea in your mind, that will unfold its great proportions. A correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit. So fast will disagreeable appearances, swine, spiders, snakes, pests, madhouses, prisons, enemies, vanish; they are temporary and shall be no more seen, The sordor and filths of nature, the sun shall dry up, and the wind exhale. As when the summer comes from the south, the snowbanks melt, and the face of the earth becomes green before it, so shall the advancing spirit create its ornaments along its path, and carry with it the beauty it visits, and the song which enchants it; it shall draw beautiful faces, warm hearts, wise discourse, and heroic acts, around its way, until evil is no more seen. The kingdom of man over nature, which cometh not with observation, -a dominion such as now is beyond his THE AMERICAN SCHOLAR AN ORATION DELIVERED BEFORE THE PHI BETA KAPPA SOCIETY, AT CAY BRIDGE, AUGUST 31, 1837. Mr. President and GentleMEN :— I greet you on the re-commencement our literary year. Our anniversary is o of hope, and, perhaps, not enough of labou We do not meet for games of strength cr skill, for the recitation of histories, tragedies and odes, like the ancient Greeks; for pa:liaments of love and poesy, like the Troubedours; 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 inde structible 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 irc: 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 as divided into fingers, the better to answer s end. The old fabie covers a doctrine ever new id sublime; that there is One Man,-prent to all particular men only partially, or rough one faculty; and that you must take e whole society to find the whole man. [an is not a farmer, or a professor, or an gineer, but he is all. Man is priest, and holar, and statesman, and producer, and ›ldier. In the divided or social state, these nctions are parcelled out to individuals, ich of whom aims to do his stint of the int work, whilst each other performs his. he fable implies, that the individual, to ossess himself, must sometimes return from is own labour to embrace all the other bourers. But unfortunately, this original nit, this fountain of power, has been so istributed to multitudes, has been so miutely subdivided and peddled out, that it spilled into drops, and cannot be gathered. he state of society is one in which the embers have suffered amputation from the unk, and strut about so many walking onsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, n elbow, but never a man. Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, to many things. The planter, who is Man ent out into the field to gather food, is eldom cheered by any idea of the true digity of his ministry. He sees his bushel and is cart, and nothing beyond, and sinks into ne farmer, instead of Man on the farm. The tradesman scarcely ever gives an ideal worth to his work, but is ridden by the outine of his craft, and the soul is subject o dollars. The priest becomes a form; the ttorney, a statute-book; the mechanic, a machine; the sailor, a rope of a ship. In this distribution of functions, the scholar s the delegated intellect. In the right state, e is Man Thinking. In the degenerate tate, when the victim of society, he tends o become a mere thinker, or, still worse, ne parrot of other men's thinking. In this view of him, as Man Thinking, he theory of his office is contained. Him Nature solicits with all her placid, all her monitory pictures; him the past instructs; im the future invites. Is not, indeed, every han a student, and do not all things exist or the student's behoof? And, finally, is ot the true scholar the only true master? Eut the old oracle said: "All things have vo handles: beware of the wrong one." n life, too often, the scholar errs with manind and forfeits his privilege. Let us see im in his school, and consider him in reerence to the main influences he receives. portance 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 splendours 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, everything 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 knowI. The first in time and the first in im-ledge 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, shortlived 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. Or, I might say, it depends on how far the process had gone, of transmitting life into truth. In proportion to the completeness of the distillation, so will the purity and imperishableness of the product be. But none is quite perfect. As no air-pump can by any means make a perfect vacuum, so neither can any artist entirely exclude the conventional, the local, the perishable from his book, or write a book of pure thought, that shall be as efficient, in all respects, to a remote posterity, as to contemporaries, or rather to the second age. Each age, it is found, must write its own books; or, rather, each generation for the next succeeding. The books of an older period will not fit this. 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 disparaged. Colleges are built on it. Book are written on it by thinkers, not by Ma Thinking; by men of talent, that is, w start wrong, who set out from accepte dogmas, not from their own sight of pr ciples. Meek young men grow up in librarie believing it their duty to accept the view which Cicero, which Locke, which Bacc have given, forgetful that Cicero, Locke, an Bacon were only young men in librarie when they wrote these books. Hence, instead of Man Thinking, we har the book-worm. Hence, the book-learn class, who value books as such; not as lated to nature and the human constitutio but as making a sort of Third Estate wa the world and the soul. Hence, the restores of readings, the emendators, the bibli maniacs of all degrees. Books are the best of things, well use abused, among the worst. What is D right use? What is the one end, which means go to effect? They are for noth but to inspire. I had better never see a boos than to be warped by its attraction clean c of my own orbit, and made a satellite inst of a system. The one thing in the world. value, is the active soul. This every mana entitled to; this every man contains with him, although, in almost all men, obstructed and as yet unborn. The soul active s absolute truth; and utters truth, or create In this action it is genius; not the privile of here and there a favourite, but the sound estate of every_man. In its essence, its progressive. The book, the college, school of art, the institution of any kin stop with some past utterance of gen This is good, say they,-let us hold by th They pin me down. They look backwar and not forward. But genius looks forward the eyes of man are set in his forehead not in his hindhead; man hopes; gent creates. Whatever talents may be, if the m create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is r his; cinders and smoke there may be, b not yet flame. There are creative manners there are creative actions and creative word manners, actions, words, that is, indicatis of no custom or authority, but springi spontaneous from the mind's own sense good and fair. On the other part, instead of being its o seer, let it receive from another mind truth, though it were in torrents of ligh without periods of solitude, inquest, self-recovery, and a fatal disservice is done Genius is always sufficiently the enemy genius by over-influence. The literature every nation bear me witness. The Engl |