(Reply to Lori)
I am overjoyed by your new bandwagon of the Englightenment, by the way. We never got round to talking much about our reactions to this essay, which I think differed more than they usually do. There were a couple of points were I saw things differently; although, of course, the rest was pretty much the standard double-response of cojoined minds..!

Your reaction to one section I found interesting: “[Books] are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system.” You wanted to burn him in effigy for this (!) because you saw it as rejecting, or more accurately as devaluing, what had come before, as if he was arguing that we should be separate from the ideas in books - separate systems, not orbiting around others' ideas. I can see your point, and it is a valid and a good one. But I suppose I was reading this from the point of view of a scholar talking to other scholars, younger scholars, in whom he is trying to stir up the fire of inspiration to continue their work as scholars proudly, without being swayed by the public opinion that scholars are as base (!!!) as women (where, similarly, I have an eloquent Anne Fadiman-esque "grrr" in the margin). He sees books as inspiration, as I am sure you do too. And he does give weight to their ideas, but as the product of the world around, and not to be valued more than experience, which I think is also a valid point. In this comment above, I see him urging the young scholars in the lecture hall to have the courage to challenge and to respond to the ideas that have gone before them, set down so authoritatively in books: to stand your ground in your own orbit (your own experience of the world and your own ideas), allowing yourself to be inspired by new ideas and provoked to new thoughts, but not swayed so drastically out of your own orbit by others' ideas that you no longer have a basis of your own opinion. His point in other parts of the essays seems to back this up, especially in his insistance that these young scholars should not shrink from attempting to write their own ideas. Books can be daunting things to young scholars, tombs of wisdom set down in black-and-white and not to be challenged. But what he is saying is: challenge them if you want to; don't be afraid to pick up the pen; these books were written by men and were the products of the thoughts of men -- you too are men and can change the world with your thoughts. It may seems as though he is undervaluing the importance of books, but I think instead he is encouraging the next generation of scholars not to shrink from their task to set down new ideas, to move forward in thought and time. Even you and I, when we read a book and identify with it to such an extent that it inspires us to change some of our ideas, go through a modification process in those ideas. We respect the words set down in books by scholars of the past, but this respect is not worship, and it would be wrong for us to be swept out of our own orbits, to use Emerson's metaphor, by every powerful book we read, so that at once we would be agreeing with Burke, while in a moment we would be swept out of those ideas by Paine. We have to bring our own judgement to bear on these things. We cannot blindly follow the opinions set down in books, because they are just that: opinions. I think that is what Emerson is pointing to when he says that books are the products of men's thoughts, and should not be worshipped as idols or statues of the men whom they represent. What would the study of literature be if books were meant to sweep us out of our own orbit with their ideas, so that we no longer had our own set of beliefs to judge with? There would be no criticism, no interpretation, no argument. Granted, we shouldn't shun them based on our views, but we should be able to remain objective, feet on the ground, able to evaluate and criticise. How else are the scholars of each new age meant to form new ideas? Each age brings a different idea to the forum, and we must use the ideas that came before us and combine these with our experience of the world, allowing us to develop new ways of seeing reality. You said "Our own orbits are rather too weak to continue ad infinitum without the help of others to inspire us." But Emerson himself says that books are meant to inspire us. They are meant to allow us to develop our own orbit, but nevertheless remain our own system, with our own gravitational pull, rather than orbitting blindly around others' stars. We would risk turning into Dorothea, blindly orbitting around Casaubon's star, unable to reject his learning as inadequate because it was set in stone as reliable. Emerson doesn't want scholars to be stars burning on their own light alone: his whole philosophy is that we must develop the ideas set before us - those we experience for ourselves in the world around us, and those we read in books. We have to burn brighter for the inspiration that these combined elements give us, but not abandon our own minds, our own souls, by our blind acceptance of others' ideas.

Besides, if you were swung out of your orbit by what everyone wrote, you would have blindly agreed with Emerson and been unable to voice these criticisms. I suppose you could accuse me of doing that, but I don't necessarily agree with everything he says, and I am allowing his words to inspire my own thoughts, not to guide me in my thinking towards complete agreement. The only book in the world that should do that is the Bible, and even then we are encouraged to think for ourselves, learn as much as we can, so that we believe instead of blindly accepting every written word.

Wow, that was longer than I thought it would be!

Emerson's argument seems to be on the side of inspiring creativity. These scholars, he argues, have to set out on their own paths and think for themselves. When he says that books are for the scholar's idle times, I agree that that devalues books a little too much, but he is talking about the importance of experiencing the world. He is talking about the criticism of scholars as stuck in their closets. He has a point when he harps on about experience, I think. Scholars can tend to have their noses in books too much (and his criticism of bibliophiles is a criticism of people who never appear from books to experience the world, and are thus stuck in others' ideas rather than allowing them to spark or inspire their own) and scholars can tend to reject experience in favour of the ideas presented in books. But this is the wrong attitude to take. He rightly comments, I think, that books are written as a result of other people's experiences, whether these experiences include inspiration and learning from other books or not, and that, therefore, when we read someone else's book, we are taking part in their experience. It is useful to us to read these things, it is inspiring and can produce knowledge. But for a scholar, whose purpose in life is to advance knowledge and stimulate the world with new ideas, what use is it for her/him to only rely on other peoples' experiences of the world? Again, there is a parellel to Middlemarch. Mr Casaubon's career as a scholar fails chiefly because he has his head stuck in books and never experiences the world for himself. It turns out that his Keys to the Mythologies are merely a regurtitation of things that have already been said, because he has relied so heavily on books. Dorothea's disillusionment with his work is that it is insubstantial - it doesn't have any relation to the world... it is dull and unimportant. In saying that books are for the scholar's idle times, Emerson implies that books are of secondary importance, and perhaps they are. But it doesn't mean they are unimportant. It means there are two types of experience. There is active experience - seeing the world for yourself, experimenting, talking, interpreting, living. And then there is the time when you are not being active (idle tends to have negative connotations of laziness, but it can mean not physically active, although I agree it is the wrong word here), and then books are the key. Emerson advocates a balance--one in favour of experience, but one in which books do play a vital role.

Finally, I don't think that Emerson was calling for a rejection of European learning and of the past ages. I think he is encouraging the American students to have the confidence to think for themselves; he wants them to be able to move forward with a new age instead of worrying about living up to ideas of the past. It was an age of revolution for them. He talks of the "historic glories of the old" alongside the "rich possibilities of the new," encouraging the American Scholar to reach into the past for inspiration, and use that and the present experience to strive boldly and bravely into the possibilities of a new world, a new knowledge. Yes, he was calling for a revolution of New England academics, but back then that was all that existed of American academics, and there was a need to insist on that revolution in order to create an American intellectual world that was brave enough to stand up to the needs of any academic world. He didn't want the New England academics to live in the past, learning what aristocratic European scholars had said and reciting line by line, heralding it as the all-encompassing truth and burying their noses in books of past glory. Rather, his speech was a rallying cry to the American intellectuals to have courage to look forward and have faith in their own powers of perception and intelligence. I don't think Emerson was ignoring other orbits; rather, I think he was trying to give confidence to this new one - the American orbit, which needed its own system, taking into account the old, but embracing the new. You are right about the cultural stagnation of America at the time, and Emerson had to change that with powerful words, even if those words were a challenge to the old European system - they needed to inspire these American Scholars towards confidence in their own ability to face the future and discover something new.