fortune; an expectation which the child, if justice is done
him, will nobly disappoint. By working on the theory that

""Education," Complete Works, etc., VoL X., p. 157.



16 EDUCATION

this resemblance exists, we shall do what in us lies to defeat
his proper promise and produce the ordinary and mediocre. I
suffer whenever I see that common sight of a parent or senior
imposing his opinion and way of thinking and being on a
young soul to which they are totally unfit. Can not we let
people be themselves, and enjoy life in their own way ? You
are trying to make that man another you. One 's enough.

Or we sacrifice the genius of the pupil, the unknown pos-
sibilities of his nature, to a neat and safe uniformity, as
the Turks whitewash the costly mosaics of ancient art which
the Greeks left on their temple walls. Rather let us have
men whose manhood is only the continuation of their boy-
hood, natural characters still; such are able and fertile for
heroic action; and not that sad spectacle with which we are
too familiar, educated eyes in uneducated bodies. 18

In further interpretation, Mr. Emerson says, in
reference to this supreme respect for the student :

It is not for you to choose what he shall know, what he
shall do. It is chosen and foreordained, and he only holds
the key to his own secret. By your tampering and thwarting
and too much governing he may be hindered from his end
and kept out of his own. Respect the child. Wait and see the
new product of Nature. Nature loves analogies, but not repe-
titions. Respect the child. Be not too much his parent. Tres-
pass not on his solitude. 19

In this whole educational process, education is
not simply of the inferior by the superior, but of-

"Ibid., p. 137.
M Ibid., p. 143.



ACCORDING TO EMERSON 17

the equal by the equal. Boys educate boys. The
education of the playing-fields may be quite as good
as that of the classroom.

This unmanliness is so common a result of our half-educa-
tion, teaching a youth Latin and metaphysics and history,
and neglecting to give him the rough training of a boy,
allowing him to skulk from the games of ball and skates and
coasting down the hills on his sled, and whatever else would
lead him and keep him on even terms with boys, so that he
can meet them as an equal, and lead in his turn, that I
wish his guardians to consider that they are thus preparing
him to play a contemptible part when he is full-grown. In
England they send the most delicate and protected child
from his luxurious home to learn to rough it with boys in
the public schools. A few bruises and scratches will do him
no harm if he has thereby learned not to be afraid. It is
this wise mixture of good drill in Latin grammar with good
drill in cricket, boating and wrestling, that is the boast of
English education, and of high importance to the matter in
hand. 20 . . . You send your child to the schoolmaster, but 't is
the schoolboys who educate him. You send him to the
Latin class, but much of his tuition comes, on his way to
school, from the shop-windows. You like the strict rules and
the long terms; and he finds his best leading in a by-way
of his own, and refuses any companions but of his own choos-
ing. He hates the grammar and Gradus, and loves guns,
fishing-rods, horses and boats. Well, the boy is right, and you
are not fit to direct his bringing-up if your theory leaves
out his gymnastic training. Archery, cricket, gun and fish-
ing-rod, horse and boat, are all educators, liberalizers ; and so
""Eloquence," Complete Works, etc., Vol. VIII.,, p. 128.



18 EDUCATION

are dancing, dress and the street talk ; and provided only the
boy has resources, and is of a noble and ingenuous strain,
these will not serve him less than the books. 21

But among the forces and causes of education
one force and cause demands special recognition.
It is religion. Religion, a mighty force itself, is to
be intellectual, and, being intellectual, it is pri-
marily concerned with education.

The religion which is to guide and fulfil the present and
coming ages, whatever else it be, must be intellectual. The
scientific mind must have a faith which is science. "There
are two things," said Mahomet, "which I abhor, the learned
in his infidelities, and the fool in his devotions. ' ' Our times
are impatient of both, and specially of the last. Let us
have nothing now which is not its own evidence. There is
surely enough for the heart and imagination in the religion
itself. Let us not be pestered with assertions and half-truths,
with emotion and snuffle. 22

The value of religion as an educator is reflected
in the history of Concord itself. In an address
given at the opening of the Concord Public Li-
brary, Emerson said :

A deep religious sentiment is, in all times, an inspirer of
the intellect, and that was not wanting here. The town was

M "The Conduct of Life: Culture," Complete Works, etc., Vol. VI.,
p. 142.

M ' ' The Conduct of Life : Worship, ' ' Complete Works, etc., Ibid., p. 240.



ACCORDING TO EMERSON 19

settled by a pious company of non-conformists from England,
and the printed books of their pastor and leader, Rev. Peter
Bulkeley, sometime fellow of Saint John's College in Cam-
bridge, England, testify the ardent sentiment which they
shared. "There is no people," said he to his little flock of
exiles, "but will strive to excel in something. What can
we excel in if not in holiness? If we look to number, we are
the fewest; if to strength, we are the weakest; if to wealth
and riches, we are the poorest of all the people of God through
the whole world. We cannot excel, nor so much as equal
other people in these things, and if we come short in grace
and holiness too, we are the most despicable people under
heaven. Strive we therefore herein to excel, and suffer not
this crown to be taken away from us." 28

In respect to the special studies which contribute
to education, Mr. Emerson has little to say. Of
science, he has a far higher opinion as an educa-
tional force than of the ancient classics. These
classics had small value to him in his college career,
and of the sciences he knew experimentally little
or nothing. But he did know them as a philoso-
pher. At considerable length, Mr. Emerson depre-
ciates the value of Latin and Greek as a foundation
in the American schools and colleges. He says :

The popular education has been taxed with a want of truth
and nature. It was complained that an education to things
was not given. We are students of words: we are shut up

21 Address at the opening of the Concord Free Public Library, Com-
plete Works, etc., Vol. XI., p. 497.



20 EDUCATION

in schools, and colleges, and recitation-rooms, for ten or fif-
teen years, and come out at last with a bag of wind, a memory
of words, and do not know a thing. We cannot use our
hands, or our legs, or our eyes, or our arms. We do not
know an edible root in the woods, we cannot tell our course by
the stars, nor the hour of the day by the sun. It is well if
we can swim and skate. We are afraid of a horse, of a cow,
of a dog, of a snake, of a spider. The Roman rule was to
teach a boy nothing that he could not learn standing. The
old English rule was, "All summer in the field, and all
winter in the study. ' ' And it seems as if a man should learn
to plant, or to fish, or to hunt, that he might secure his sub-
sistence at all events, and not be painful to his friends and
fellow-men. The lessons of science should be experimental
also. The sight of a planet through a telescope is worth all
the course on astronomy; the shock of the electric spark in
the elbow outvalues all the theories; the taste of the nitrous
oxide, the firing of an artificial volcano, are better than vol-
umes of chemistry.

One of the traits of the new spirit is the inquisition it
fixed on our scholastic devotion to the dead languages. The
ancient languages, with great beauty of structure, contain
wonderful remains of genius, which draw, and always will
draw, certain like-minded men, Greek men, and Eoman men,
in all countries, to their study ; but by a wonderful drowsi-
ness of usage they had exacted the study of all men. Once
(say two centuries ago), Latin and Greek had a strict re-
lation to all the science and culture there was in Europe,
and the Mathematics had a momentary importance at some
era of activity in physical science. These things became stere-
otyped as education, as the manner of men is. But the Good
Spirit never cared for the colleges, and though all men and



ACCORDING TO EMERSON 21

boys were now drilled in Latin, Greek and Mathematics, it
had quite left these shells high and dry on the beach, and
was now creating and feeding other matters at other ends
of the world. But in a hundred high schools and colleges this
warfare against common-sense still goes on. Four, or six, or
ten years, the pupil is parsing Greek and Latin, and as soon
as he leaves the University, as it is ludicrously styled, he
shuts those books for the last time. Some thousands of
young men are graduated at our colleges in this country
every year, and the persons who, at forty years, still read
Greek, can all be counted on your hand. I never met with
ten. Four or five persons I have seen who read Plato.

But is not this absurd, that the whole liberal talent of this
country should be directed in its best years on studies which
lead to nothing? What was the consequence? Some intelli-
gent persons said or thought, ' ' Is that Greek and Latin some
spell to conjure with, and not words of reason? If the
physician, the lawyer, the divine, never use it to come at
their ends, I need never learn it to come at mine. Conjuring
is gone out of fashion, and I will omit this conjugating, and
go straight to affairs. ' ' So they jumped the Greek and Latin,
and read law, medicine, or sermons, without it. To the aston-
ishment of all, the self-made men took even ground at once
with the oldest of the regular graduates, and in a few months
the most conservative circles of Boston and New York had
quite forgotten who of their gownsmen was college-bred, and
who was not. 2 *

But in his "English Traits," Mr. Emerson
considered and to a degree approved of quite a

14 "New England Beformers," Complete Works, etc., VoL HI., pp.
257-60.



22 EDUCATION

different interpretation of the ancient classics.
He writes:

The effect of this drill is the radical knowledge of Greek and
Latin and of mathematics, and the solidity and taste of Eng-
lish criticism. Whatever luck there may be in this or that
award, an Eton captain can write Latin longs and shorts,
can turn the Court-Guide into hexameters, and it is certain
that a Senior Classic can quote correctly from the Corpus
Poetarum and is critically learned in all the humanities.
Greek erudition exists on the Isis and Cam, whether the Maud
man or the Brasenose man be properly ranked or not; the
atmosphere is loaded with Greek learning ; the whole river has
reached a certain height, and kills all that growth of weeds
which this Castalian water kills. The English nature takes
culture kindly. So Milton thought. It refines the Norseman.
Access to the Greek mind lifts his standard of taste. He has
enough to think of, and, unless of an impulsive nature, is
indisposed from writing or speaking, by the fulness of his
mind and the new severity of his taste. The great silent crowd
of thoroughbred Grecians always known to be around him,
the English writer cannot ignore. They prune his orations
and point his pen. Hence the style and tone of English jour-
nalism. The men have learned accuracy and comprehension,
logic, and pace, or speed of working. They have bottom, en-
durance, wind. When born with good constitutions, they
make those eupeptic studying-mills, the cast-iron men, the
dura ilia, whose powers of performance compare with ours
as the steam-hammer with the music-box ; Cokes, Mansfields,
Seldens and Bentleys, and when it happens that a superior
train puts a rider on this admirable horse, we obtain those



ACCORDING TO EMERSON 23

masters of the world who combine the highest energy in af-
fairs with a supreme culture. 28

In his interpretation of the great theme, Mr.
Emerson alludes again and again, and under divers
conditions, to the relationship, or lack of relation-
ship, between intellect and character. He uses
character in the narrow sense as standing for
moral manhood and also in the comprehensive
sense as standing for the whole of manhood, includ-
ing will, conscience, heart, as well as intellect. He
usually, however, uses character in the narrow
sense and often makes the relationship between
character and intellect one of contrast. In his
Journal for 1844, at the age of forty, he says :

Pure intellect is the pure devil when you have got off
all the masks of Mephistopheles. 26

And also, in the year preceding, he says :
The Intellect sees by moral obedience. 27

In character, even in the narrow sense, he in-
cludes not only all the cardinal virtues, but also the
cardinal graces. In a striking paragraph repre-

*" English Traits," Complete Works, etc., Vol. V., pp. 206-08.

"Journal XXXV., Journals of Ralph Waldo Emerson, edited by Ed-
ward Waldo Emerson and Waldo Emerson Forbes. Houghton, Mifflin
Co., 1911. Vol. VI., p. 497.

w Journal XXXIV., Journals, etc., Ibid., p. 483.



24 EDUCATION

senting both the unity and the diversity in the im-
pression which the soul makes on character, he
says:

Character repudiates intellect, yet excites it ; and character
passes into thought, is published so, and then is ashamed
before new flashes of moral worth. 28

In a large way, he declares :

This is the law of moral and of mental gain. The simple
rise as by specific levity not into a particular virtue, but
into the region of all the virtues. They are in the spirit which
contains them all. The soul requires purity, but purity is
not it ; requires justice, but justice is not that ; requires benef-
icence, but is somewhat better ; so that there is a kind of de-
scent and accommodation felt when we leave speaking of
moral nature to urge a virtue which it enjoins. To the well-
born child all the virtues are natural, and not painfully
acquired. Speak to his heart, and the man becomes sud-
denly virtuous.

Within the same sentiment is the germ of intellectual
growth, which obeys the same law. 29

In speaking of the relationship between Shake-
speare and Swedenborg, he says :

The human mind stands ever in perplexity, demanding in-
tellect, demanding sanctity, impatient equally of each with-
out the other. 30

28 "Character," Complete Works, etc., Vol. III., p. 105.
M ' ' The Over-Soul, ' ' Complete Works, etc., Vol. II., p. 275.
""'Representative Men: Swedenborg," Complete Works, etc., VoL
IV., p. 94.



ACCORDING TO EMERSON 25

And yet the intellect and the character, which
are so diversely contrasted, are closely knit and
intimately related. In speaking on Webster he
lays down the principle that " great thoughts come
from the heart," and uses the happy phrases
"moral sensibility/' 31 "moral perception," "moral
sentiment." Passages are these which suggest
Pascal 's great phrase :

The heart has its reasons that the reason knows not of.
He also declares :

There is an intimate interdependence of intellect and mor-
als. Given the equality of two intellects, which will form
the most reliable judgments, the good, or the bad hearted?
"The heart has its arguments, with which the understanding
is not acquainted." For the heart is at once aware of the
state of health or disease, which is the controlling state, that
is, of sanity or of insanity ; prior of course to all question of
the ingenuity of arguments, the amount of facts, or the ele-
gance of rhetoric. So intimate is this alliance of mind and
heart, that talent uniformly sinks with character. 33

In his "Natural History of Intellect," he further
declares :

n "The Fugitive Slave Law" Lecture at New York. Complete
Works, etc., Vol. XI., p. 223.

"Ibid., p. 205.

""The Conduct of Life: Worship," Complete Works, etc., Vol. VI.,
p. 217.



26 EDUCATION

The spiritual power of man is twofold, mind and heart,
Intellect and morals ; one respecting truth, the other the will.
One is the man, the other the woman in spiritual nature.
One is power, the other is love. These elements always coexist
in every normal individual, but one predominates. 34

He closes one of his papers in the Dial on "The
Tragic," with the remark:

The intellect in its purity and the moral sense in its purity
are not distinguished from each other, and both ravish us
into a region whereunto these passionate clouds of sorrow
cannot rise. 35

The nature of the education which thus unites
character and intellect is broad. He declares :

Education should be as broad as man. Whatever elements
are in him that should foster and demonstrate. If he be dex-
terous, his tuition should make it appear ; if he be capable of
dividing men by the trenchant sword of his thought, educa-
tion should unsheathe and sharpen it; if he is one to cement
society by his all-reconciling affinities, oh! hasten their ac-
tion ! If he is jovial, if he is mercurial, if he is great-hearted,
a cunning artificer, a strong commander, a potent ally, in-
genious, useful, elegant, witty, prophet, diviner, society has
need of all these. The imagination must be addressed. Why
always coast on the surface and never open the interior of
Nature, not by science, which is surface still, but by poetry?

""Natural History of Intellect," Complete Works, etc., Vol. XII.,
p. 60.

85 Papers from the Dial: "The Tragic," Complete Works, etc., Ibid.,
p. 417.



ACCORDING TO EMERSON 27

is not the Vast an element of the mind ? Yet what teaching,
what book of this day appeals to the Vast?

Our culture has truckled to the times, to the senses. It
is not manworthy. If the vast and the spiritual are omitted,
so are the practical and the moral. It does not make us
brave or free. We teach boys to be such men as we are. We
do not teach them to aspire to be all they can. We do not
give them a training as if we believed in their noble nature. 86

This breadth of education, however, should be
made perfectly consistent with two great elements :
the element of drill and the element of inspiration.
Inspiration without drill is vapid. Drill without
inspiration is dull, phlegmatic. Both combined
produce the worthy scholar and man.

If he have this twofold goodness, the drill and the inspira-
tion, then he has health ; then he is a whole, and not a frag-
ment; and the perfection of his endowment will appear in
his compositions. Indeed, this twofold merit characterizes
ever the productions of great masters. The man of genius
should occupy the whole space between God or pure mind
and the multitude of uneducated men. He must draw from
the infinite Reason, on one side; and he must penetrate into
the heart and sense of the crowd, on the other. From one,
he must draw his strength ; to the other, he must owe his
aim. The one yokes him to the real ; the other, to the appar-
ent. At one pole is Reason ; at the other, Common Sense. If
he be defective at either extreme of the scale, his philosophy

""Education," Complete Works, etc., Vol. X., p. 134.



28 EDUCATION

will seem low and utilitarian, or it will appear too vague
and indefinite for the uses of life. 37

Toil is the essence of drill, and from it no man is
to seek excuse. Great scholars, great thinkers, are
great laborers. The long and insistent song of the
worth of labor for the student, Emerson sings in
prose and verse. He says :

No way has been found for making heroism easy, even for
the scholar. Labor, iron labor, is for him. The world was
created as an audience for him ; the atoms of which it is made
are opportunities. Read the performance of Bentley, of Gib-
bon, of Cuvier, Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, Laplace. "He can
toil terribly," said Cecil of Sir Walter Raleigh. These few
words sting and bite and lash us when we are frivolous. Let
us get out of the way of their blows by making them true
of ourselves. There is so much to be done that we ought to
begin quickly to bestir ourselves. This day-labor of ours,
we confess, has hitherto a certain emblematic air, like the
annual ploughing and sowing of the Emperor of China. Let
us make it an honest sweat. Let the scholar measure his
valor by his power to cope with intellectual giants. Leave
others to count votes and calculate stocks. 38

In this drill and inspiration, the student must
seek solitude. Companionship is not for him. His
lamp he himself lights. Its rays shine upon his
book alone. Emerson always thought of himself as

"'Literary Ethics," Complete Works, etc., Vol. I., p. 182.
""Greatness," Complete Works, etc., Vol. VIII., p. 311.



ACCORDING TO EMERSON 29

a man apart, as a spectator and auditor, as one not
able to join in other men's sports or labors. Out
of his own experiences, he writes :

He must embrace solitude as a bride. He must have his
glees and his glooms alone. His own estimate must be meas-
ure enough, his own praise reward enough for him. And
why must the student be solitary and silent? That he may
become acquainted with his thoughts. If he pines in a
lonely place, hankering for the crowd, for display, he is not
in the lonely place; his heart is in the market; he does not
see; he does not hear; he does not think. But go cherish
your soul; expel companions; set your habits to a life of
solitude ; then will the faculties rise fair and full within, like
forest trees and field flowers; you will have results, which,
when you meet your fellow-men, you can communicate, and
they will gladly receive. Do not go into solitude only that
you may presently come into public. Such solitude denies it-
self ; is public and stale. The public can get public experience,
but they wish the scholar to replace to them those private,
sincere, divine experiences of which they have been defrauded
by dwelling in the street. It is the noble, manlike, just
thought, which is the superiority demanded of you, and not
crowds but solitude confers this elevation. Not insulation
of place, but independence of spirit is essential, and it is
only as the garden, the cottage, the forest and the rock, are
a sort of mechanical aids to this, that they are of value.
Think alone, and all places are friendly and sacred. 19

The qualities of the education which man thus
receives are not hard to deduce. His scholarship

""Literary Ethics," Complete Works, etc., VoL I., p. 173.



30 EDUCATION

has to represent accuracy. He does not go to the
scientists for his justification and confirmation, but
rather to the philosophers.

Accuracy is essential to beauty. The very definition of
the intellect is Aristotle's: ''that by which we know terms
or boundaries." Give a boy accurate perceptions. Teach
him the difference between the similar and the same. Make
him call things by their right names. Pardon in him no
blunder. Then he will give you solid satisfaction as long as
he lives. It is better to teach the child arithmetic and Latin
grammar than rhetoric or moral philosophy, because they
require exactitude of performance; it is made certain that
the lesson is mastered, and that power of performance is
worth more than the knowledge. 40

In this growing education of the student, it is
not to be forgotten that development requires time.
Since Emerson himself was a schoolboy, two years
have been saved in the ordinary education of the
schoolboy, but time still remains an essential condi-
tion. It cannot do anything. It is no agent, as
Lord Bacon says, but it is a necessary condition for
doing. Nature seems to deceive us in making us
believe that time is not necessary for growth, but
the deception is very bare-faced.

In the year 1841, at the age of thirty-eight,
Emerson writes in his journal:

40 "Education," Complete Works, etc., Vol. X., p. 147.



ACCORDING TO EMERSON 31

It seems to me sometimes that we get our education ended
a little too quick in this country. As soon as we have learned
to read and write and cipher, we are dismissed from school
and we set up for ourselves. We are writers and leaders of
opinion and we write away without check of any kind, play
whatsoever mad prank, indulge whatever spleen, or oddity,
or obstinacy, comes into our dear head, and even feed our
complacency thereon, and thus fine wits come to nothing, as
good horses spoil themselves by running away and straining
themselves. I cannot help seeing that Doctor Channing
would have been a much greater writer had he found a strict
tribunal of writers, a graduated intellectual empire estab-