Emerson: Self-Reliance and The American Scholar

On of the main issues I came across in reading Emerson was that I found contradictory directions in the introductions of Self-Reliance and The American Scholar. In the first paragraph of The American Scholar, Emerson states that:
-“the gods in the beginning divided Man into me, that he might be more helpful to himself.”
-“there is One Man, -present to all particular men only partially, or through one faculty.”
He regards this knowledge as a great wisdom, expressing that instead of living in a right state in which the main foundation of men is an one intact unit, we live within a degenerate state in which all of the abilities have been too far divided. As for the position of the scholar, Emerson explains that in an ideally unified state, in which men recognize that all men comprise one Man, the scholar represents the noble action of Man Thinking. He contrasts this model with the degenerate version in which the scholar is merely a “thinker”, or “the parrot of other men’s thinking”.
The deduction for these first few paragraphs of The American Scholar is that it is vital for performance within a society and self-actualization that we consider all men part of a wider entity which is Man.
Self-Reliance not only appeared to contradict this perspective, but also to negate its value. As I read the essay, I anticipated passages prescribing that we work to completely depend on ourselves, especially in regard to physical and material necessities. The following statements confusingly (in my opinion) appear on the first page in relation to what a person feels, believes and thinks:
1. “To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart, is true for all men, -that is genius”.
2. “Speak your latent conviction and it shall be the universal sense: for always the inmost becomes the outmost.”
Neither of these statements made a whole lot of sense to me, both in regard to introducing the concepts of self-reliance or in having any individual self-contained meaning. While the rest of the document contains many fantastic pieces of wisdom, I finally realized that Emerson is not discussing the importance of Self-reliance as far as health and security or self-sufficiency within the realm of physical needs. The purpose of Self-Reliance­ is to promote knowing your own mind and being true to that mind. Said self-reliance related to relying on your own mind. In other words, the lesson of Self-reliance borrows from Platonic teachings and from two recognizable quotes:
The ancient Greek proverb “Know thyself” which once accomplished should be followed by the principle of “to thine own self be true.”
Once I reread some of the sections in both texts, I found the connection between what I had misjudged to be adverse works. Self-trust is vital in both. In The American Scholar Emerson states that:
“In self-trust, all the virtues are comprehended. Free should the scholar be, -free and brave.”
In Self-Reliance he states that man should be weary of conforming and to “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.”
The American Scholar was written in 1937, while Self-Reliance was written in 1941. Since clarifying the purpose of both, the relationship between the counsel within both works has become clearer as well. My assumption is that while the mastery of self-reliance (in Emerson’s sense) should be observed over an individual’s lifetime, and can take a life’s full journey to achieve, the advice from Self-reliance­ actually precedes the advice of The American Scholar. Ultimately, I believe that trusting one’s self is both the initial and ultimate necessity of one’s life according to Emerson, and that distrust in one’s self impedes a person from ever accomplishing anything.