Addresses and Lectures

Speeches of 1837 to 1844, among them the Harvard address that kept Emerson out of the university for nearly thirty years.

by Ralph Waldo Emerson273 passages held

English, the original language, and your language

First published: 1849(aged 46)
Original language: English

Report a rights issue

Overview

Seven seniors were finishing at Harvard Divinity School in the summer of 1838, and members of the class invited Emerson to speak to them. On the evening of 15 July, in Divinity Hall, with their professors and several local ministers listening, he told them that the church had turned Jesus into a worker of past miracles, that its preaching was lifeless, and that each of them should speak out of a first-hand experience of God rather than repeat the record of someone else's. The response was immediate and personal. Andrews Norton, a Harvard biblical scholar, attacked the new thinking in print as a modern form of unbelief, and Henry Ware Jr., who had been one of Emerson's mentors at the divinity school, preached against the address that September. Emerson was not invited to speak at Harvard again for nearly thirty years. He had spoken there the year before: "The American Scholar," delivered to the Phi Beta Kappa Society on 31 August 1837, told American students to stop deferring to European books and to learn first from nature and from their own action; Emerson printed it at his own expense, and the 500 copies sold out within a month. The remaining pieces, given between 1838 and 1844 at Dartmouth College, at Waterville College in Maine, before Boston's mechanics' and merchants' library associations and in a winter series at the city's Masonic Temple, carry the same demand into reform, politics and trade: change has to begin in each person's own conduct. In "The Transcendentalist" he defines the movement around him: idealists who trust their own perception over custom. James Munroe collected the speeches in 1849, in a volume titled Nature; Addresses, and Lectures.

Key concepts

What does Emerson mean by Man Thinking?

Man Thinking is the scholar in the right state: a person who thinks on behalf of everyone, as the delegated intellect of society. Emerson contrasts it with the degenerate state, in which the scholar becomes a mere thinker, or worse, a parrot of other men's thoughts. The phrase rests on his fable that humanity was split into specialists, so that the scholar is the one who keeps thinking whole.

What are the three influences on the scholar in The American Scholar?

Nature, books and action. Nature comes first in time and importance: every day the sun and the stars teach the mind to classify and find unity. Books, the mind of the past, are useful but dangerous, since readers start to obey them instead of thinking. Action is subordinate but essential. Without it, Emerson says, the scholar is not yet a man, because thought cannot ripen into truth.

What is the sentiment of virtue in the Divinity School Address?

It is a reverence and delight in the presence of certain divine laws, felt directly rather than learned from scripture. Emerson makes it the root of all religion: when the heart opens to it, a person learns that their being is without bound and that they are born to the good. Churches, on his account, are worth what they keep this sentiment alive, and no more.

Why does Emerson call the method of nature ecstasy?

Because nature does not work toward one particular goal but toward a universe of ends at once. A purpose can be drawn as a straight line of definite length; nature's work, Emerson says, is better drawn as a circular movement, always overflowing any single use. He asks the same of a person: to act from that overflowing whole rather than for one private aim.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Faith at first hand

Must religion come to each person through a church and its record, or can anyone meet God directly? Emerson told a room of future ministers that the record had replaced the meeting.

The Divinity School Address charges the church with preaching a Jesus of past miracles while the soul goes unfed. The word miracle, as the churches say it, is Monster, not one with the clover and the rain; historical Christianity dwells with noxious exaggeration on one person. Emerson's example is a sermon during which the snowstorm outside was real and the preacher merely spectral. He asks the graduates to love God without mediator or veil. "The Transcendentalist" names the movement this belief produced: idealism, trusting consciousness over experience.

religion
spirituality
faith
intuition
idealism
preaching
inspiration
truth
self-knowledge
knowledge

Enter a dialogue

The scholar, the reformer and the young country

What should a thinking person in a new country actually do: read, work, reform or conserve? Emerson asks scholars and reformers alike to start with their own sight and their own hands.

"The American Scholar" tells Harvard's students that books are for idle times and that a scholar learns first from nature and from action, so as to be Man Thinking rather than a bookworm. Meek young men grow up in libraries, accepting what Locke concluded. The later speeches carry this into public life. "Man the Reformer" holds inherited wealth tainted and asks everyone to share manual labour. "The Conservative" grants each party half the truth, and "The Young American" calls the land the remedy for what is false in the culture.

scholarship
intellectual independence
education
social reform
reform
labor
property
conservatism
social change
action
individuality
nature
self-reliance
creativity

Enter a dialogue

Within this work

passages held: 273
distinct concepts: 466
by passages held, corpus-wide: #274

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “knowledge” and “nature”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 19 pairings. 94 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
knowledge	nature	9
creativity	knowledge	3
education	nature	3
education	self-reliance	3
idealism	social reform	3
creativity	nature	2
education	knowledge	2
education	religion	2
education	social reform	2
self-reliance	social reform	2
creativity	education	1
creativity	self-reliance	1
idealism	knowledge	1
idealism	nature	1
idealism	religion	1
idealism	self-reliance	1
nature	self-reliance	1
nature	social reform	1
religion	social reform	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1836 Nature
Emerson's first book, and the seed of nearly everything he wrote afterward. He signed his name to it only when it was reprinted in 1849, in a volume alongside his addresses and lectures.
EN
1841 Essays: First Series
Lectures reworked into essays; with the Second Series of 1844, the book on which Emerson's standing as a philosopher mainly rests.
EN
1844 Essays: Second Series
Darker than its predecessor of 1841, and the book of "Experience" and "The Poet". It closes what is usually counted Emerson's most fertile decade, which had begun with Nature.
EN
1849 Addresses and Lectures you are here EN
1850 Representative Men
Emerson's one book built of portraits of other minds, published after his lecture tour of England in 1847–48 — the journey that later produced English Traits (1856).
EN
1860 The Conduct of Life
One of Emerson's most successful books in its day, and the last collection he published for ten years.
EN
1870 Society and Solitude
Ten years after The Conduct of Life, and continuing its turn toward practical life. It appeared in the same year that Harvard asked Emerson to lecture on philosophy.
EN
1875 Letters and Social Aims
Begun to forestall an unauthorized London edition, and the last essay collection published in Emerson's lifetime. Its pieces range from essays of the early 1840s to lectures of his last working years.
EN
1883 Lectures and Biographical Sketches
Added to Emerson's collected works in the years just after his death; a later volume, Natural History of Intellect, followed in 1893.
EN
1893 Natural History of Intellect, and Other Papers
The closest Emerson came to a treatise on the mind, published from his papers after his death and bound with essays from the start of his career.
EN

— or open another of their works