The American Scholar Today

Abstract

t I ^HE title of these remarks you will have recognized as I borrowed from the address delivered by Ralph Waldo JL Emerson before the Harvard Chapter of Phi Beta Kappa nearly a hundred years ago. This address remains the high water mark reached by the great annual tide of such orations ; and had it not been for the unreasonable prejudice against delivering orally anything that has already been printed I should have urged the authorities to permit the reading of Emerson's oration as the best possible way of initiating the series which begins tonight.