1849.] 309. 6 THOMAS CARLYLE. The only conclusion fairly deducible from these passages and the writings of Mr. Carlyle abound with such-seems to be, that the man who would realize his true destiny will do well to eschew everything recorded as distinctively Christian, in place of looking to All that source for any special assistance. that man needs to know concerning the nature and laws of the Infinite, every man who has a soul left in him may know from himself. External utterances can add nothing to his "inner light." "Rituals, liturgies, credos, Sinai thunders,"-these can add nothing to the revelation which every man has in to be a what he himself is. By one grown man," such externalities can be of no value. Mr. Carlyle's belief, accordingly, never rises to the height of a mystical rationalism—it is a devout, we had almost said a methodistical sort of deism. The faith he so much extols is thus limited as to its object, and derives all its supposed worth from the moral courage and energy that may spring from it. We wish we could regard it as embracing any properly Christian element, but this, we presume, Mr. Carlyle himself does not expect from any man who has read with attention what he has written; and it is high time, we think, that all mystification on this material point should come to an end, and that the fact of the case should be stated in definite and honest speech. but Reverence alone that shall now lead me! | they never do well under a régime of partialities and favoritisms. Revelations, Inspirations? Yes: and thy own We sympathize very largely, however, god-created Soul'; dost thou not call that a 'revelation? Who made THEE? Where didst thou with Mr. Carlyle in his doctrine on this point. come from? The Voice of Eternity, if thou be not a blasphemer and poor asphyxied mute, speaks We go far with him in his kindly ingenuities as he labors to give a pleasant meaning to with that tongue of thine! Thou are the latest Birth of Nature; it is the Inspiration of the Al- the wild mythology of our rude Northmen. mighty' that giveth thee understanding! My bro-True, the material is somewhat stubbornther, my brother!"-Past and Present, pp. 305- hard to bend to his purpose-but he labors at it with a resoluteness worthy of some brave old sea-king. What, for example, could be less promising than the cosmogony of these our remote progenitors? The giant Ymer is slain-slain at last. The gods consult, and having Ymer's substance, consisting of warm wind, frost, fire, and other strange things at their service, they resolve to make a world out of this dead great one. His blood becomes the sea, his flesh the land, his bones the rocks, his skull the immense concave above us, and his brains the floating clouds! One Norse god is before us "brewing ale," that he may give fitting entertainment to another; while another-Thor by name goes a journey into a far country to bring home a pot for the occasion, and, after many adventures, places the elegant utensil on his head, helmet fashion, and travels back with it, the handles thereof descending like Untamed donkey's ears down to his heels! In stories like these Mr. Carlyle can see Thought, great, giantlike, enormous-to be tamed in due time into the compact greatness, not giantlike, but godlike, and stronger than gianthood, of the Shakspeares and Goethes." Taking the same friendly spirit of interpretation along with him everywhere, it of course follows that he finds "good in everything." Under a thousand disguises he can see religious thought and emotion struggling towards utterance-a philosophy of man, and a theology, too, reaching towards their birth-time and object. The mythology of Greece is accounted prettier than this of the Norsemen-not more noble. All the strange faiths that have covered the earth are only the reflex pictures of man's need as a being who must in some way be religious. There is a broad substratum of truth in human nature, and this truth mingles itself more or less with everything human. On this ground our author can sometimes bestow his good word on Christianity, sometimes on our Christian sects, not excepting the fantastic exhibitions made upon occasions by the said "Men love not darksects in Exeter Hall. ness, they do love light. A deep feeling of the eternal nature of Justice looks out among us everywhere-even through the dull eyes II. What we say of the doctrine of Mr. Carlyle concerning Faith, we say of his doctrine concerning the Veracities to be found in all Religions-it is a truth, a weighty truth, but a truth pushed so far as to become the parent of error, and to cease to be itself The Faith which kindles the a pure truth. fires of the auto-de-fé may be earnest; and the Philosophy which ends in atheism may not be wanting in catholicity. Earnestness and catholicity have their worth, but the value of these qualities depends very much on their relations to others, and on the limits to which they are restricted in consequence of such relations. It is with our faculties and our virtues, as it is with our households, 66 of Exeter Hall. An unspeakable religiousness struggles in the most helpless manner to speak itself in Puseyisms and the like. Of our cant, all condemnable, how much is not condemnable without pity; we had almost said without respect! The inarticulate word and truth that is in England goes down yet to the foundations."-Past and Present, p. 396. common sentiment of mankind, and give a perilous advantage to the philosophical assailant of Revelation. It is not always borne in mind by our religious teachers, that there is an ascertainable distinction between morality and piety; and that actions may be evangelically defective-defective as to their source and object-without ceasing to be moral. There is no surer mode of making Christianity repulsive, than to place it at issue with what is essential to our manhood and responsibility. so means. His meaning rather is, that literary or philosophical churches should take the place of existing churches, and that the old creeds should give place to a creed much narrower, simpler, and more flexible, making small appeal to the logic of the age, more to its intuitions, its conscience, its emotions. Here it is : Christian theologians have themselves to thank for much of the extravagance observable in this respect in Mr. Carlyle and in many beside. Too often, our divines have But, as we have said, an error does not seemed to forget, that the Bible and nature cease to be such because you can trace it to are from the same source. Because human- its source. Some men have made idols of ity, as now conditioned, includes much that church-creeds. Seeing this, our philosopher the Bible must condemn, not a few have been says-Let us have no more to do with too ready to assume that it can include noth-churches or with creeds. Not that he really ing the Bible may approve. Sufficient care has not been always taken to cede to the moral nature of man the portion of worth which, according to the testimony of Revelation itself, is still reserved to it. Nor has a wise discrimination been always made between the true and false religions, disowning those elements only which have given to them their falseness. Judging from the manner in which some of our very orthodox preachers express themselves, we should suppose that they see no moral difference between the least depraved among the children of Adam and the most depraved-between Rush the murderer, and the most amiable of their own children, who does not happen to be a Christian. Of course the persons who, from negligent usage, or to give an imaginary cohesiveness to a theological system, indulge in expressions to this effect, do not really believe what they seem to teach. Their daily conversation and conduct in relation to the non-Christian members of their families and connexions, furnish abundant proof to the contrary. But great mischief comes from the technical affectation of seeming to believe after this manner. Mr. Carlyle's doctrine is a revolt against this grave error. Some men will assert that there can be good of no kind in human nature apart from Christianity; and the natural reaction against this error is in the assertion that all the good really attainable by man may be attained without the least help from Christianity. The one party will see no good in human nature that has not come to it from the Gospel, and the other will see no good in the Gospel that has not come to it from human nature. The extremes of some of our theologians in this form run sadly counter to the general language of the Bible, and to the "Nature's laws, I must repeat, are eternal: her small still voice, speaking from the inmost heart of us, shall not, under terrible penalties, be disregarded. No one man can depart from the truth without damage to himself; no one million Show of men, no twenty-seven millions of men. me a nation fallen everywhere into this course, so I will show you a nation traveling with one asthat each expects it, permits it to others and himself, sent on the broad way-the broad way, however many Banks of England, Cotton-Mills, and Duke's Palaces it may have! Not at happy Elysian fields, and everlasting crowns of victory, earned by silent valor, will this nation arrive; but at precipices, devouring gulfs, if it pause not. has appointed happy fields, victorious laurel crowns; but only to the brave and true; un-nature, what we call chaos, holds nothing in it but vacuities, devouring gulfs. What are twentyseven millions and their unanimity? Believe them not: the Worlds and the Ages, God and Nature, and all men, say otherwise. Nature "Rhetoric all this?' No, my brother, very singular to say, it is fact all this. Cocker's Arithmetic is not truer. Forgotten in these days, it is as old as the foundations of the Universe, and will endure till the Universe cease. It is forgotten now; and the first mention of it puckers thy sweet countenance into a sneer; but it will be brought to mind again-unless, indeed, the Law of Gravitation chance to cease, and men find that Unanimity of the they can walk on vacancy. twenty-seven millions will do nothing: walk not thou with them; fly from them as for thy life. Twenty-seven millions traveling on such courses, with gold jingling in every pocket, with vivats heaven high, are incessantly advancing, let me that it should rise under such influence to the again remind thee, towards the firm land's end-high estate so earnestly coveted for it by our towards the end and extinction of what Faithful- author, that we do not understand. Indeed, ness, Veracity, real Worth, was in their way of if there be truth in the axiom, that where the life."-Past and Present, pp. 193-4. causes are only the same, the effects can be only the same, we think it certain that our author's millennium may come after doomsday, certainly not before. We find no fault with this creed. It errs not on the side of fault. It errs by defect. The world has had it from the beginning, and, we regret to say, has made but a sorry use of it. Our fear is, that the world may possess it much longer and show small sign of improvement. It is a "credo" that may suffice, in some instances, to mould philosophers into stoics, and the example of such men may have its value. But the herd of human kind have never shown themselves remarkably docile under such teaching. They have found within them other forces than those which prompt men to right-doing, and when disposed to listen to the evil counsel whispered to them from that quarter, they have been slow in submitting to dictation from without. If the "inner light" be to do all-then why not their own inner light before that of any other man, or of many other men? We can conceive of such a man, of multitudes of such men, as saying, even to the face of our author-"Who made thee a ruler or a judge over us?" So it has ever been under the reign of these natural 66 "credos." Those who interpret the law, it is said, are ever half the makers of it. So it is eminently when the law is loose, shadowy, and unwritten. From this cause, and some others, each man, in this church of the philosophers, has been left to become a law unto himself, which means, for the most part, being left to be wholly without law. That "Faithlessness, Unveracity, Worthlessness," are profitless in the long run, yea, very costly, men have been told everywhere and through all time; with what effect the real Past has sufficiently reported to the Present. It avails not to emphaticize the assertion that "nature's laws" are clear as the light, and fixed as "the law of gravitation," for if so, our world must hitherto have been a Bedlam or a Pandemonium, or some strange mixture of both, for slow has it been to discern this clearness-this fixedness. And why the nature which has been so dull or so perverse under all such preaching through the past six thousand years, should become much more manageable by such means in the future, Mr. Carlyle may be able to explain; to ourselves, the ground of hope in that direction is not great. That the world should be able to rub on upon such a creed much as heretofore we can understand; but you The Nor is this all. This "credo" is not only wanting in the clearness, fixedness, and imperativeness necessary to prevent the frequent putting of what is no law in the place of law, and the hope of impunity in the place of the fear of penalty, it leaves the non-working, and still more the evil-working, in this world of non-workers and evil-workers, in dreadful exigency. You may preach to men that they have only need to work-to work today and onward, and all will be well. But these same "Nature's laws," to which make appeal, say not so. Here, in a thousand instances, my good deeds avail nothing towards compensating for my evil ones. curse wedded to the evil comes, and naught can hinder it. Who has told you it will not be so hereafter? These laws, to which you look as polestars in your voyage thither, say not so-but the contrary, rather. And is it a trifle, O man! to leave a question like this unsolved? Can the "credo" be really worth much which declines all dealing with it? Look, moreover, to your own ideal of humanity, and to its actuality-to man, as he should be, according to the law of his faculties, and to man as he is, according to the forces of his condition, and can this credo of thine suffice for such a being, a credo which simply says "Help thyself, O weak one! for by the Eternal laws it is decreed that help from a higher than thyself shall never come to thee." We must say, that the commending of such a creed to such a nature, as being all that it needs, is to our own dread consciousness a sad mockery of human want and suffering. It is a faith which every man of a sound and deep moral consciousness must feel to be a very cold and shallow affair. It goes not down to the depths of our spiritual thraldom. It goes not up to the height of our true spiritual destiny. It calls men to energetic action, but for the motives which alone may sustain such action it finds no resting-place. It leaves the past an impenetrable mystery, the future an impenetrable mystery, and the present hour with a faith by no means adequate to the hour. The eternities are, the graves are, but they make no sign, they teach no lesson! Right, you say, will be done-done on man which some of our theologians will not read at all, are read by some of our philosophers in that spirit of Bibliolatry which they so much contemn elsewhere-viz., with a resolve that everything attainable or needed by man shall be found there. "If the books," said the Caliph Omar, "agree with the Koran, they may be burnt as useless; if they disagree with it, they should be burnt as irreligious." Many a divine, and many a philosopher, who would not be forward to plead the authority of Omar, may now be seen acting upon his maxim. To this effect is the language of many of our Bibliolaters whose chosen Bible is Nature, and of many more whose Bible has come to them from history. We should have been glad to find Mr. Carlyle in better company than with either of these parties. But in the revulsion of his scorn from the narrowness of certain school divines, he has dropped into a groove hardly less narrow as a philosopher. Hence the conflict, diversified at present by some novelties of taste and temper, is the same in its substance with that of the early part of the last century-Christianity versus Deism. III. The sum of our statement, then, is, that what Mr. Carlyle says about Faith would be good, if said under wiser discrimination and restriction; and that the same holds of his Catholic doctrine in respect to Truth as having its place more or less along with all error. Not less thus is it with his teaching in relation to the attribute of Mystery. Here, too, he is both right and wrong. He shows us, in many ways, that the superficialities of modern literature, and the low mechanic spirit of modern science do not satisfy him. He must look beyond the surface of man to the man proper-beyond the machine to the hand which constructed it. Even of man's inner nature he would know more than can be seen by the understanding; and of the great Mechanist he would know more than can be learnt from the coarser elements of the machine which he has constructed and set a-going. Contrasted with play on the mere surface, and amidst the mere | laws of things, with which even the most busy and effective intellects of our time so largely content themselves, these earnest incursions into more spiritual regions of thought are truly refreshing and noble. In the presence of this great moral-and we should perhaps say religious reformer-not a few of the flippant and hollow conventionalisms of the times seem to drop at once into their natural insignificance. What existence really means, whence it came, what it should be?— on these questions, on which scarcely a thought is bestowed by the vulgar or dilettante crowd about him, his own thoughts are gravely fixed. But after what manner has our author concerned himself with these serious questions, and with what effect? It is obvious that they are questions embracing the whole range both of philosophy and religion. We wish we could speak of the result as fully equal to the apparent intention. The following passage is somewhat long, but it presents the clearest view to be found in the writings of Mr. Carlyle of the philosophy which he has adopted from the schools of Germany. German Philosophy, we need here only advert to "Now, without entering into the intricacies of the character of Idealism, on which it is everywhere founded, and which universally pervades it. In all German systems, since the time of Kant, it is the fundamental principle to deny the existence of Matter; or rather, we should say, to believe it in a radically different sense from that in which the Scotch Philosopher strives to demonstrate it, and the English Unphilosopher believes it without demonstration. To any of our readers, who has dipped never so slightly into metaphysical reading, this Idealism will be no inconceivable thing. Indeed, it is singular how widely diffused, and under what different aspects, we meet with it among the most dissimilar classes of mankind. Our Bishop Berkeley seems to have adopted it from religious inducements: Father 6 Boscovich was led to a very cognate result, in his Theoria Philosophia Naturalis,' from merely mathematical considerations. Of the ancient Pyrrho or the modern Hume we do not speak; but in the opposite end of the earth, as Sir W. Jones informs us, a similar theory, of immemorial age, prevails among the theologians of Hindostan. Nay, Professor Stewart has declared his opinion, that whoever at some time of his life has not entertained this theory, may reckon that he has yet shown no talent for metaphysical research. Neither is it any argument against the Idealist to say that, since he denies the absolute existence of matter, he ought in conscience likewise to deny its relative existence; and plunge over precipices, and run himself through with swords, by way of recreation, since these, like all other material things, are only phantasms and spectra, and therefore of no consequence. If a man, corporeally taken, is but a phantasm and spectrum himself, 1849.] THOMAS CARLYLE. all this will ultimately amount to much the same "The Idealist, again, boasts that his Philosophy that were to be let unfurnished,' occasioned a hollow echo, as of Laughter, from the empty Apartments; though the words are in themselves quite harmless, and may represent the basis of a metaphysical Philosophy as fitly as any other words. But farther, and what is still stranger than such Idealism, according to these Kantean systems, the organs of the Mind too, what is called the Understanding, are of no less arbitrary, and, as it were, accidental character than those of the Body. Time and Space themselves are not external, but internal entities; they have no outward existence, there is no Time and no Space out of the mind; they are mere forms of man's spiritual being, laws under which his thinking nature is constituted to act. This seems the hardest conclusion of all; but it is an important one with Kant; and is not given forth as a dogma; but carefully deduced in his Critik der Reinen Vernunft with great precision, and the strictest form of argument."-Essays, ii., p. 219-222. If the reader has gone through this extract attentively, and it deserve thus much at his hand, he will have observed the large concessions here made to skepticism. Our senses give us no real knowledge of things. Our understandings give us no real knowledge of things. By the senses, we only know how things appear-appear to us. By the understanding, we only know what the laws are by which the understanding must act. So that from these sources we really know nothing. Everything is phantasm-in nothing is there certainty. Nor is this all. It is not enough that the whole range of things with which our senses and our understanding bring us into contact should be thus surrendered to the skeptic, and be left as things simply in doubt, of which we may not utter yea or nay--the senses are declared to be positively deceptive, and the understanding not less so. The report which the senses give in relation to the appearances of things is not true. The report which the understanding gives, even in reference to such elementary conceptions as the existence of matter, and time, and space, is not true. Things are not, cannot be, as they appear to our senses. Objects are not, cannot be, as they do appear and must appear to our understanding. Now it will not be denied that what is thus said concerning the senses is in part true. The qualities of bodies, as color, form, and substance, are to us, as determined by our particular powers of perception in relation to such qualities. But this admission, while conceding that we do not know things in themselves, leaves the trustworthiness of what we know of them in their relation to us un |