Teaching Oneself

Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals, October 14, 1832:

Would it not be the text of a useful discourse to young men, that every man must learn in a different way? How much is lost by imitation! Our best friends may be our worst enemies. A man should learn to detect and foster that gleam of light which flashes across his mind from within far more than the lustre of [the] whole firmament without. Yet he dismisses without notice his peculiar thought because it is peculiar. The time will come when he will postpone all acquired knowledge to this spontaneous wisdom, and will watch for this illumination more than those who watch for the morning. For this is the principle by which the other is to be arranged. This thinking would go to show the significance of self-education; that in reality there is no other; for, all other is nought without this. 

A man must teach himself because that which each can do best, none but his maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is the master that could have taught Shakspeare? Where is the master that could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is an unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is just that part he could not borrow. . . . Every man comes at the common results with most conviction in his own way. But he only uses a different vocabulary from yours; it comes to the same thing. 

An imitation may be pretty, comical, popular, but it never can be great. Buonaparte mimicked Themistocles. If anybody will tell me who it is the great man imitates in the original crisis when he performs a great act,—who Muley Molok imitated, or Falkland, or Scipio, or Aristides, or Phocion, or Fox, or More, or Alfred, or Lafayette, I will tell him who else can teach him than himself. A man has got to learn that he must embrace the truth, or shall never know it; that to be thankful for a little is the way to get more. He is to work himself clear of how much nonsense and mischief. He is to learn, like the Persian, to speak the truth.