Transcendentalism is a philosophy that Emerson helped to found, along with his friends Henry David Thoreau and Margaret Fuller. Its precepts are both a belief in the individual—and the power of individual thought to shape the world—and a sense of universality and the common good. Emerson often expresses this sense of universality as an “one soul” (Paragraph 35): a spirit and intelligence that animates all living creatures. He believes that it is an awareness of this common spirit that forms a true community, more than an adherence to social customs and institutions.

This philosophy can be seen to underpin much of “The American Scholar,” which is not surprising, since the lecture concerns Emerson’s vision of an ideal American intellectual. Emerson alludes often in the lecture to a sense of universality and oneness, which he believes that the scholar ignores at his peril. Writing about the scholar’s relation to the natural world, he deems it necessary that a scholar not only know how to identify and classify natural phenomena, but also that he have an awareness of his own commonality with nature: “He shall see that nature is the opposite of the soul, answering to it part for part.