One must he an inventor to
read well. As the proverb says, 'He that would bring home the wealth
of the Indies must carry out the wealth of the Indies.'--When the
mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book
we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is
doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the
world."

It is not enough that the scholar should be a student of nature and of
books. He must take a part in the affairs of the world about him.

"Action is with the scholar subordinate, but it is essential.
Without it he is not yet man. Without it thought can never ripen
into truth.--The true scholar grudges every opportunity of action
past by, as a loss of power. It is the raw material out of which the
intellect moulds her splendid products. A strange process, too, this
by which experience is converted into thought as a mulberry leaf is
converted into satin. The manufacture goes forward at all hours."

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