The American Scholar

Emerson emphasizes the importance of a scholar who is engaged and active in the world, believing as he does that action informs the intellect. Even when he is not discussing actual labor and trades, he frequently employs labor metaphors when writing about intellection. Discussing the idea of a democratization of culture—by which means he believes that a true “revolution” will be founded—he declares: “The main enterprise of the world for splendor, for extent, is the upbuilding of a man. Here are the materials strewn along the ground” (Paragraph 35). Elsewhere, praising what he sees as a new societal tendency to focus on “the near, the low, the common,” Emerson states: “That which had been negligently trodden under foot by those who were harnessing and provisioning themselves for long journeys into far countries, is suddenly found to be richer than all foreign parts” (Paragraph 40).

Both of these statements serve to make the abstract tactile and vigorous; they also serve to dramatize the difficulty involved in thought. The first statement compares the project of man’s self-reliance to the building of a house; the second statement compares man’s search for lofty intellectual goals to “long journeys” for which they must “provision themselves.