descendant of Calvin is Garrison or Parker.

The determinism of the system becomes freedom by immanent and necessary dialectic.

Upon this matter of Calvinism, in connection with Carlyle, very much might be said. The conflict which appears in him might perhaps be most precisely defined as the conflict between Calvinism and Lessingism, or the modern German idea. It was a Titan's effort to grasp at once a monistic philosophy, which sees all opposition as essentially only a means to the realization and manifestation of the one positive purpose of the universe, having of itself no existence, and a dualism to which light and darkness, good and evil, are alike absolute and primal quantities. This dualism Carlyle inherited from a long line of the old Covenanting stock, and it was too thoroughly inwrought into his nature and too consistent with his temperament to yield to ten times as much Germanism as inspired "Natural Supernaturalism." The main criticism of Mr. James upon Carlyle is really a simple arraignment of the old theology. "He never had the least idea that I could discover," says Mr. James, "of the true or intellectually educative nature of the conflict of good and evil, as being purely ministerial to a new and final evolution of human nature itself into permanent harmony with God's spiritual perfection." It is a just criticism. Tender as his personal sympathies were, helpful and human as he was, explicit as was his occasional recognition

CALVINISM AND GERMAN PHILOSOPHY. 109

of the infinite nature of each soul,1 imperious as his assertion of a responsibility and freedom which must negate and cancel explicit Calvinism in the end, Carlyle still failed to appropriate the most inspiring conception of his German philosophy and to view humanity consistently as an organism, whose history is the process of a divine education. "Carlyle's precise intellectual weakness was that he never had a glimpse," as Mr. James says, that he had no adequate, consistent grasp, I should say, "of any distinctively divine ends in human nature, but only in the more or less conflicting persons of that nature; and hence he was unable to justify the advance of the social sentiment in humanity, the sanest, deepest, most reconciling sentiment ever known to man's bosom."

And yet the modern conception has by no means so completely conquered all its difficulties, that we have a right to belabor the Fichtes and Carlyles in too high-handed a fashion for carrying the stern law of the survival of the fittest into the world of souls. Carlyle is no originator of damnation, and does not deserve this extraordinary vilification for

1 "Of those stupid multitudes there is no one but has an immortal soul within him, a reflex and living image of God's whole universe; strangely, from its dim environment, the light of the Highest looks through him ; — for which reason, indeed, it is that we claim a brotherhood with him, and so love to know his history, and come into clearer and clearer union with all that he feels, and says, and does.” — Essay on Johnson.

his savage preaching that few are chosen. Dante and Michael Angelo would have made very short work with our universal redemption and education of the race. Dante left Socrates in Limbo, and a score of worthy philosophers and poets, whom our popular orthodoxy itself has now ushered, by the back door, into heaven. This we may say was an accident of his culture but his Inferno was not an accident of his culture; and the belaboring of Carlyle may easily become the belaboring of the Dantesque element in thought. The danger which besets the new theology is that, in denying that there is death for sinners, it weakens the conception of retribution for sin, and brings in an era of corrupting complacency. No man has a right to the new philosophy, who has not a clear conscience and an inwrought, eternal sense of the sinfulness of sin and just in proportion as a man is in earnest in his fight with the falsehoods and wrongs in the world will these assume independence and vitality over against him, and will he fall naturally into the language of Carlyle. "Carlyle's Manichæanism," says one, "must be the working theory of a part of man's life at all times. Uncompromising hostility towards the army of the devil is the condition of all that is energetic and beneficent in human action. Our age has inadequately realized this truth, and Thomas Carlyle, we believe, was sent to teach it to us."

CARLYLE'S PHILOSOPHY OF HISTORY. III

XI.

Carlyle's philosophy of history is a doctrine of election. "The history of what man has accomplished in this world," he says, "is at bottom the history of the Great Men who have worked here;" and in explaining, for instance, German doings, in 1870, or a century before, he would speak only of Bismarck or Frederick, and have almost no word about the strong instinct of nationality in the Prussian people, which was, after all, the main factor. Setting himself violently against the leveling tendency of the age, he refuses to see anything but the great mountain-peaks in the historic landscape as worthy of deep study or worth much attention at all."The Great Man of an age is, beyond comparison, the most important phenomenon therein; all other phenomena, were they Waterloo victories, Constitutions of the Year One, glorious revolutions, new births of the golden age in what sort you will, are small and trivial"

To-day, for the most part, history and poetry and art, devoted formerly almost exclusively to the princes of the earth, are directed to the people, the movements of the masses, common life; and the tendency is even to depreciate genius by explaining it, which in a certain sense implies a mastery of it. The truth is, that you explain half of it—the half which is not genius - and that an earnest study of the medium in which genius lives helps to

a right appreciation of genius. "Genius," says Mazzini, "is like the flower which draws one half of its life from the moisture that circulates in the earth, and inhales the other half from the atmosphere. The inspiration of genius belongs one half to heaven, the other to the crowd of common mortals from whose life it springs." The exacter statement would be that the genius is the monad raised to a higher power; that our power to understand him and to explain him lies in our common potencies, and our failure to explain him is in proportion to our inferior development, plus our inability, as simple monads, to explain ourselves. The common potencies we do have; history, as Emerson says, is all in me. But it is in me only in very poor form, and I shall develop myself only by seeing myself in higher form. Hence the uses of great men and of hero-worship. Christianity is the greatest hero-worship; but it ends in making all men sons of God. Christ the mediator becomes Christ the brother, and we are forced to make the same definition of our essential nature which Christ made of himself, however inadequate our realization of it, however incomplete, to return to our Leibnitzian phrase, the development of the monads. The Church, with its sharp and absolute distinction at first, really bears the seed of the Commonwealth. And it will be the democrat, and not the despot, who will quote Carlyle, as the years show clearly the true drift of his thought. He who wor