Mr. Cooke says truly of this oration, that nearly all his leading ideas found expression in it.  This was to be expected in an address delivered before such an audience.  Every real thinker’s world of thought has its centre in a few formulae, about which they revolve as the planets circle round the sun which cast them off.  But those who lost themselves now and then in the pages of “Nature” will find their way clearly enough through those of “The American Scholar.”  It is a plea for generous culture; for the development of all the faculties, many of which tend to become atrophied by the exclusive pursuit of single objects of thought.  It begins with a note like a trumpet call.

“Thus far,” he says, “our holiday has been simply a friendly sign of the survival of the love of letters amongst a people too busy to give to letters any more.  As such it is precious as the sign of an indestructible instinct.  Perhaps the time is already come when it ought to be, and will be, something else; when the sluggard intellect of this continent will look from under its iron lids and fill the postponed expectations 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, astronomers announce shall one day be the pole-star for a thousand years?”

Emerson finds his text in the old fable which tells that Man, as he was in the beginning, was divided into men, as the hand was divided into fingers, the better to answer the end of his being.  The fable covers the doctrine that there is One Man; present to individuals only in a partial manner; and that we must take the whole of society to find the whole man.  Unfortunately the unit has been too minutely subdivided, and many faculties are practically lost for want of use.  “The state of society is one in which the members have suffered amputation from the trunk, and strut about so many walking monsters,—­a good finger, a neck, a stomach, an elbow, but never a man....  Man is thus metamorphosed into a thing, into many things....  The priest becomes a form; the attorney a statute book; the mechanic a machine; the sailor a rope of the ship.”

This complaint is by no means a new one.  Scaliger says, as quoted by omnivorous old Burton:  “Nequaquam, nos homines sumus sed partes hominis.”  The old illustration of this used to be found in pin-making.  It took twenty different workmen to make a pin, beginning with drawing the wire and ending with sticking in the paper.  Each expert, skilled in one small performance only, was reduced to a minute fraction of a fraction of humanity.  If the complaint was legitimate in Scaliger’s time, it was better founded half a century ago when Mr. Emerson found cause for it.  It has still more serious significance to-day, when in every profession, in every branch of human knowledge, special acquirements, special skill have greatly tended to limit the range of men’s thoughts and working faculties.