Emerson does not use the words “unconscious cerebration,” but these last words describe the process in an unmistakable way.  The beautiful paragraph in which he pictures the transformation, the transfiguration of experience, closes with a sentence so thoroughly characteristic, so Emersonially Emersonian, that I fear some readers who thought they were his disciples when they came to it went back and walked no more with him, at least through the pages of this discourse.  The reader shall have the preceding sentence to prepare him for the one referred to.

    “There is no fact, no event in our private history, which shall not,
    sooner or later, lose its adhesive, inert form, and astonish us by
    soaring from our body into the empyrean.

“Cradle and infancy, school and playground, the fear of boys, and dogs, and ferules, the love of little maids and berries, and many another fact that once filled the whole sky, are gone already; friend and relative, professions and party, town and country, nation and world must also soar and sing.”

Having spoken of the education of the scholar by nature, by books, by action, he speaks of the scholar’s duties.  “They may all,” he says, “be comprised in self-trust.”  We have to remember that the self he means is the highest self, that consciousness which he looks upon as open to the influx of the divine essence from which it came, and towards which all its upward tendencies lead, always aspiring, never resting; as he sings in “The Sphinx “:—­

      “The heavens that now draw him
        With sweetness untold,
      Once found,—­for new heavens
        He spurneth the old.”

“First one, then another, we drain all cisterns, and waxing greater by all these supplies, we crave a better and more abundant food.  The man has never lived that can feed us ever.  The human mind cannot be enshrined in a person who shall set a barrier on any one side of this unbounded, unboundable empire.  It is one central fire, which, flaming now out of the lips of Etna, lightens the Capes of Sicily, and now out of the throat of Vesuvius, illuminates the towers and vineyards of Naples.  It is one light which beams out of a thousand stars.  It is one soul which animates all men.”

And so he comes to the special application of the principles he has laid down to the American scholar of to-day.  He does not spare his censure; he is full of noble trust and manly courage.  Very refreshing it is to remember in this day of specialists, when the walking fraction of humanity he speaks of would hardly include a whole finger, but rather confine itself to the single joint of the finger, such words as these:—­