The American Scholar

“Our day of dependence, our long apprenticeship to the learning of other lands, draws to a close.”

Emerson is referring specifically here to America’s dependence on European learning and thought. His aim in this essay is to define a new American way of being an intellectual: hence the essay’s title. He calls for a type of intellectualism that is less beholden to tradition, less backwards-looking, and more engaged in the world.

“The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man.” 

One of Emerson’s central ideas in this essay is an idea of connectivity or oneness: a state from which he believes that modern man has become detached. This is one of many blunt and vivid images that he employs to make what he sees as the isolation and fragmentation of modern life immediate—and disturbing—to the reader.

“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.”

Emerson believes that the American scholar must have an awareness of the natural world, an awareness that involves something beyond mere knowledge. He also believes that the American scholar should not only have a scientific understanding of the natural world, but something like a mystical one as well. The American scholar should have a sense of himself as a part of this world, rather than a detached observer of it, and should see its patterns as the same patterns that govern him.