The American Scholar**
I greet you on the re-commencement of our literary year. Our anniversary is not merely a celebration of books, but a call to action. There is a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide. He must take himself—his whole, raw, unaccommodated self—for better, for worse, as his only true possession.
The scholar is that delegated intellect. In the divided state of society, we have lost the whole man. The farmer is reduced to a laborer, the merchant to a speculator, the priest to a ritualist. But the scholar must resist this fragmentation. He is not a mere thinker, nor a passive bookworm, but *Man Thinking*. He does not borrow from the past; he creates the future. England’s Shakespeare and Germany’s Goethe are his guides, not his masters. The books of antiquity are but the record of a bygone mind. The scholar must write his own Bible today.
The first and great resource of the scholar is Nature. The second is the past—books. Yet books are for the scholar’s idle times. When they are held as absolute truth, they become tyrannical. The third and most vital influence is Action. Without action, thought can never ripen into truth. The scholar who labors with his hands, who engages with the world’s commerce, who speaks against injustice—he alone knows the weight of an idea. I look upon the scattered condition of our country and I see a new hope. Our long dependence on foreign learning must end. We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe. The sun shines today on our own fields, on our own rivers, on our own unpretending log cabins. We will walk on our own feet; we will work with our own hands; we will speak our own minds. The scholar is the world’s eye and the world’s heart. He is the first of men. The hour is now.