The American Scholar

"The scholar is that man who must take up into himself all the ability of the time, all the contributions of the past, all the hopes of the future..." - Ralph Waldo Emerson, "The American Scholar" (1837) The American Scholar (1837), is an address delivered by Ralph Waldo Emerson to the Harvard Chapter of the Phi Beta Kappa Society. Emerson's writing was focused on providing a philosophical framework for escaping European culture and building a new, distinctly American identity. This essay is a declaration of independence of the United States intellectual community from Europe's. It also expresses the author's belief that the American scholar could only achieve a higher state of mind by rejecting old ideas and by thinking for himself, to become "Man Thinking" rather than "a mere thinker, or still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking," "the sluggard intellect of this continent."