Excerpt from The American Scholar of the Twentieth Century: As Address Before the Phi Beta Kappa Society of the Northwestern University

Henrik Ibsen, and his way of putting the matter is this: Men still call for special revolutions, for revolutions in politics, in externals. But all that sort of thing is trumpery. It is the human soul that must revolt. If we give this truth its rightful meaning, not misinterpreting it as an excuse for quietism, nor ourselves withdrawing from the arena under its shelter, we shall find it to be the very essence of every philosophy of reform, the prerequisite of every effective effort for the regeneration of our social life.

At the close of the summer of 1787, the Fathers of the Republic were completing their arduous task of shaping that instrument of government which we call the Constitution of the United States, and which we hold in veneration as the fundamental law of a free com monwealth based upon the principle of self-government. Thus did our ancestors give lasting political effect to the ideas of the Declara tion of Independence. Exactly half a century later, on the closing day of the summer of 1837, Ralph Waldo Emerson, then thirty four years of age, addressed the Phi Beta Kappa Society of Harvard College in words that burned themselves upon the minds of his hearers, and marked an epoch in the history of American thought. His theme was The American Scholar, and his utterance has, by common con sent, come to be known as our intellectual Declaration of Independence. The young men who heard this address, says Dr. Holmes, Went out from it as if a prophet had been proclaiming to them, 'thus saith the Lord From the very first paragraph, the address was a clarion call to the onset in our warfare of the spirit, a prophetic paean sublimely confident of the intellectual victories that our future must have in store. Perhaps the time is already come, said the young speaker, when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron 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, shall one day be the pole star for a thousand years?

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