Ralph Emerson American Scholar Essay

“The mind now thinks; now acts; and each fit reproduces the other…he has always the resource to live.

“The mind now thinks; now acts; and each fit reproduces the other…he has always the resource to live.

Apa Rubric Research Paper - Ralph Emerson American Scholar Essay

At their urging he had five hundred copies of his talk printed, at his own expense, rather blandly titled "An Oration, Delivered before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Cambridge, August 31, 1837." The little pamphlet sold out within a month.

When Emerson reprinted it for the 1849 collection Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, he changed the title to the more familiar and more accurate "The American Scholar."By "scholar," it is important to note, he did not primarily mean a haunter of libraries with a narrow range of specialization but rather something like what we might call a public intellectual—that is, a person of learning who by his or her writing plays an active and thoughtful role in society.

And, by extension, he speaks to every reader's intellectual life and the roles we all play or should play as "Man Thinking." The "American" part of the title needs qualification too, for except in the somewhat formulaic beginning and a brief (but important) section at the end, Emerson is more concerned with the universal elements of the scholar's education and duties than with any national or nationalistic aspects of his subject.

Man is then convinced “that he and it nature proceed from one root; one is leaf and one is flower.”296 This thinking of man is the opposite from the truth of the relationship between nature and himself.

“He shall see that nature is the opposite of the soul….