Scholar

“ But the old oracle said, ‘All things have two handles: beware of the wrong one.’ In life, too often, the scholar errs with mankind and forfeits his privilege. Let us see him in his school, and consider him in reference to the main influences he receives.
I. The first in time and the first in importance of the influences upon the mind is that of nature.{81} Every day, the sun; and, after sunset, night and her stars. Ever the winds blow; ever the grass grows. Every day, men and women, conversing, beholding and beholden. The scholar is he of all men whom this spectacle most engages. ”

“ Scholarship is the realm of nicely adjusted opinion. It is the business of scholars to assess evidence and test conclusions, to discriminate values and reckon probabilities. Literature is the realm of conviction and vision. Its points of view are as various as they are oftentimes unverifiable. It speaks individual faiths. Its groundwork is not erudition, but reflection and fancy. Your thoroughgoing scholar dare not reflect. To reflect is to let himself in on his material; whereas what he wants is to keep himself apart, and view his materials in an air that does not color or refract. ”

“ Your true scholar is not such. His learning is his instrument; his knowledge is designed for good and useful ends, not for ornament and display; and whether it be his treasures are from the languages, or the rich revealings of history, or skill in the sciences, or the beautiful creations of art; in all he sees the great and plastic power of man for human well-being and human progress. ”

“ How comes it that you tell your young scholar, he must not content himself with barely understanding his authors, but must be continually reading them all, as the only means of entering into their spirit, and forming his own judgment according to them? ”

“ A disciple asked him what qualities a man must possess to entitle him to be called a scholar. The master said: "He must be earnest, urgent, and bland,--among his friends earnest and urgent, among his brethren bland." And, "The scholar who cherishes a love of comfort is not fit to be deemed a scholar." ”

“ It was his lot to be strong as the thinker, the moralist with "the accomplishment of verse," the scholar interested to rebuild the past of experience, the teacher with an explicit dogma to enforce in an intellectual form with examples from life, the anatomist of human passions, instincts, and impulses in all their gamut, the commentator on his own age ”

“ A scholar, a lover of mankind and particularly of youth, his happiness in his work, which was almost his whole life, was truly sufficient to make him appear singularly fortunate to the thoughtful observer. ”

“ Finally, when the scholar wishes it, he will examine him formally, but his real work will be to teach the scholar to make his own observations, to solve his own problems, to find his own aids to study in books, dictionaries, maps, etc., to fight his way through his own difficulties to victory and so reach the only moral reward for his trouble with broadened insight and increased strength. ”

“ Shall I tell you the secret of the true scholar? It is this: Every man I meet is my master in some point, and in that I learn of him. ”

“ The mind of the scholar, also, if you would have it large and liberal, should come in contact with other minds. ”

“ We ask why the scholar is interested in his subject, why he has sought this knowledge? And in most cases we find the right reason when we have found the logical connection and have sought it logically. ”

“ STUDIES serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight, is in privateness and retiring; for ornament, is in discourse; and for ability, is in the judgment, and disposition of business. For expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs, come best, from those that are learned. To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humor of a scholar. ”

“ Many of them have force of will and character, and become distinguished in practical life; but very few of them ever become great scholars. A scholar is, in a large proportion of cases, the son of scholars or scholarly persons. ”

“ One eminent scholar, being entreated to deliver a course of lectures on a somewhat abstruse theme, replied that if people really desired information on that subject, and if they could read, he begged to refer them to two books he had written several years before. ”

“ The scholar, in his pride of intellect, forgets the progressive steps he took in his own mental development—the stories read to him in the nursery, the boy's book of adventure in which he revelled with delight, and the sentimental novel over which he shed tears in his youth. ”

“ Henceforward, throughout the whole course of these Lectures, he only will be esteemed a Scholar who, through the Learned Culture of his age, has actually attained a knowledge of the Idea, or at least strives with life and strength to attain it. ”

“ He in whom Learned Culture has actually accomplished its end,—the attainment and possession of the Idea,—shows, by the manner in which he regards and practises the calling of the Scholar, that his vocation is to him, before all other things, honourable and holy. ”

“ The greatest pleasure of their life was to find sometimes a scholar of capacity, in whom they could plant, besides the refinements of Latin syntax and prosody, some of their favourite ideas--a heathenish view of the greatness of man, influences on which the scholar, perhaps, in his manhood, looked back with a smile. ”

“ The love of the Idea absolutely for itself, and particularly for its essential light, shows itself in those men whom it has inspired, and of whose being it has fully possessed itself, as knowledge of the Idea;—in the Finished Scholar, with a well-defined and perfect clearness,—in the Progressive Scholar, as a striving towards such a degree of clearness as it can attain under the circumstances in which he is placed. ”

“ Beginning with that thirst of knowledge for its own sake which goes to make the great scholar, it was soon diverted into the two chief channels of intellectual interest which characterised her age—the decay of the older religious ideals and the growth of a scientific conception of the universe, including man. ”

“ A scholar, a calmly rational politician, and a man of almost dainty refinement both physically and morally, he devoted himself thenceforward to study, to authorship, and to the cultivation of the social amenities in which his experience was probably as wide and as remarkable as that of any one of his contemporaries. ”

“ Emerson notes three influences acting upon the scholar. First, nature, always with us and taking the impress of our minds. Second, books, which, noble as they are in theory, have their danger: ‘I had better never see a book than be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit.’ Third, life, everything which is the opposite of mere thinking. ‘If it were only for a vocabulary the scholar would be covetous of action. ”

“ The modern scholar by moderate effort, though no giant, stands upon an elevation which was piled up by one generation of learners and thinkers after another with slow, painstaking, and disinterested toil. ”

“ your young white, who gathers his learning from books and can measure what he knows by the page, may conceit that his knowledge, like his legs, outruns that of his fathers’, but, where experience is the master, the scholar is made to know the value of years, and respects them accordingly.” ”

“ Being himself a scholar and a student, he determined that his boy and girl, so far as he could shape their lives, should be scholars also. To teach them all he knew was henceforth his chief occupation ”

“ And an engaging address, "an insinuating behaviour," was to be sought for early in life, and, at the same time, with the solid parts of learning. "The Scholar, without good breeding, is a Pedant: the Philosopher, a Cynic: the Soldier, a Brute: and every man disagreeable." ”

“ It is, as we have seen, through the action of an appropriate sense, and in no other way, that the information which is supplied to the scholar, when he is learning this or that subject, is converted into knowledge, and is so made available both for the further understanding of the given subject and for the nutrition of the scholar's own inner life. ”

“ If you would learn to write, 't is in the street you must learn it. Both for the vehicle and for the aims of fine arts, you must frequent the public square. The people, and not the college, is the writer's home. A scholar is a candle which the love and desire of all men will light. ”

“ Above all, he must possess that which we have already described as the creative or artist-talent of the Scholar; namely, a perfect readiness and capacity to recognise, under any circumstances, the first germ of the Idea as it begins to unfold itself; in each individual case to discover the most suitable means of aiding it to the attainment of perfect life, and in every case to associate it with an appropriate form. ”

“ Besides those possessors of the Idea, whose business it is, by guiding and ordering the affairs of men, to introduce the Idea immediately into life, there is yet another class—those, namely, who are peculiarly and by preëminence called Scholars, who manifest the Idea directly in spiritual conceptions, and whose calling it is to maintain among men the conviction that there is, in truth, a Divine Idea accessible to human thought, to raise this Idea unceasingly to greater clearness and precision, and thus to transmit it from generation to generation fresh and radiant in ever-renewed youth. ”

“ Farther:—the knowledge which he has acquired by means of this sincere effort after something higher, will render him always a suitable instrument in the hands of the higher Scholar,—of him who has attained possession of the Idea. ”

“ The fixed disposition and modes of action, or in a word, the character, of the true Scholar, when contemplated from the highest point of view, can, properly speaking, only be described, not by any means enacted or imposed. ”

“ The diligent scholar is he that loves himself, and desires to have reason to applaud and love himself. ”

“ Now, the scholar, or the literatoor, or writer, thinks if he can only stand up on that certain hite of scientific discovery, or Akkropolis of literatoor, he will be happy; for he will known all that he cares about, and will have all the fame he wants to. ”

“ In this distribution of functions, the scholar is the delegated intellect. In the right state, he is, Man Thinking. In the degenerate state, when the victim of society, he tends to become a mere thinker, or, still worse, the parrot of other men's thinking. ”

“ and hence arises the true vocation of the Scholar; the most widely extended survey of the actual advancement of the human race in general, and the steadfast promotion of that advancement. ”

“ Here, for the first time, can he be clearly taught, and led to comprehend and acknowledge that which I have endeavoured to utter to you in these lectures, that our whole race has its only true existence in the Divine Thought, that its only worth consists in its harmony with this Divine Thought, and that the class of Scholars has therein an existence only to the end that they may comprehend this Divine Thought and imprint it on the world. ”

“ March 12, 1853. It is essential that a man confine himself to pursuits, a scholar, for instance, to studies which lie next to and conduce to his life, which do not go against the grain either of his will or his imagination. The scholar finds in his experience some studies to be most fertile and radiant with light, others, dry, barren, and dark. ”

“ Teach your scholar to observe the phenomena of nature; you will soon rouse his curiosity, but if you would have it grow, do not be in too great a hurry to satisfy this curiosity. Put the problems before him and let him solve them himself. Let him know nothing because you have told him, but because he has learnt it for himself. Let him not be taught science, let him discover it. If ever you substitute authority for reason he will cease to reason; he will be a mere plaything of other people's thoughts. ”

“ A concluding essay addresses the issue of the scholar in society. The authors typically “discuss the nature, value, philosophy, and underlying assumptions of their subjects; outline the history of relevant scholarship; survey major issues and approaches of the past, present, and foreseeable future; and conclude with suggestions for further reading.” Although directed to a student audience, the essays offer authoritative and balanced introductions for all nonspecialists. ”

“ LAMARCK.
THERE are two classes of scholars. Those of the one class, who travel in the footsteps of their predecessors, increase the domain of knowledge, and add new discoveries to those that were made before them; their labors are immediately appreciated, and they enjoy their well-earned fame in full measure. Others, who leave the trodden ways, emancipate themselves from traditions, and expose to the light of the sun the germs of future discovery which lie buried in the teachings of the present. ”

“ The Scholar may securely reckon upon this trust in his honesty and skill, as soon as he has earned it as he ought. Further, there is in all men a feeling of truth, which indeed is not sufficient in itself, but must be developed, proved, and purified ”