What should an ideal Scholar be like, according to Emerson? or Examine critically the various ideas expressed by Emerson.

    “The American Scholar” is one of the famous essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson. The lecture mainly contains Emerson’s view of the American Scholar, that means what an ideal American Scholar should be like.

     Emerson divides of man into men and told about the distribution of function of these men. He derived the idea of the division of man from an ancient fable. According to this philosophy, the gods in ancient time divide ‘Man’ into ‘Men’ so that he might be more helpful to himself, just as the hand was divided into fingers to make a more effective organ. One Man is all Men a farmer, a professor, an engineer, a soldier. In a society, each man performs his particular work. The ancient fable also says that the individual must sometime return to the labour of all other individuals. He must act as the whole man. But the original unit, the one Man has been so minutely sub-divided that it is “Spilled into drops and cannot be gathered to form the whole.”

    In this division of function, the Scholar is the delegated intellect. In the degenerate state of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or imitate the other men’s thinking.

     Then Emerson tells about the various sources of education open to the American Scholar. The influence of Nature is the foremost. A scholar will open out his soul to nature and then the influence of nature will flow into him and would mould his soul.

     The scholar should study books, but books are not used by him as things to follow blindly. Then Emerson emphasizes action. A scholar must be a man of action. “A great soul will be strong to live, as well as to strong to think.”