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CARLYLE AND GOETHE.

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as futile and childish, yet opens an ample bosom for all forms of beauty in art and for all nobleness in moral aspiration. There is, indeed, a whole heaven betwixt the serenity, balance, and bright composure of the one, and the vehemence, passion, masterful wrath, of the other; and the vast, incessant, exact inquisitiveness of Goethe finds nothing corresponding to it in Mr. Carlyle's multitudinous contempt and indifference, sometimes express and sometimes only very significantly implied, for forms of intellectual activity that do not happen to be personally congenial. . . . . But each is a god, though the one sits ever on Olympus, while the other is as one from Tartarus. There is in each, besides all else, a certain remarkable directness of glance, an intrepid and penetrating quality of vision which defies analysis. .... Carlyle's mind, like Goethe's, is really of an intensely practical turn, although his constant presentation of the eternities, the immensities, and the like, has sometimes veiled from his readers his almost narrow adherence to plain record without moral comment, and his often cynical respect for the dangerous, yet, when rightly qualified and guided, the solid, formula that What is, is.1 We are never bidden, either by Car

1 "It seems as though a soul so violent, so enthusiastic, so savage, so abandoned to imaginative extravagances, so void of taste, order, and measure, would be capable only of rambling and expending itself in hallucinations full of gloom and danger. Two entirely English barriers have restrained and di

lyle or Goethe, to strive or hope for a freedom that is unbounded. Circumstance has fixed limits that no effort can transcend. Novalis complained in bitter words, as we know, of the mechanical, prosaic, utilitarian, cold-hearted character of Wilhelm Meister, constituting it an embodiment of 'artistic atheism,' while English critics as loudly found fault with its author for being a mystic. Exactly the same discrepancy is possible in respect of Carlyle's own writings. In one sense he may be called mystic and transcendental, in another baldly mechanical and even cold-hearted, just as Novalis found Goethe to be in Meister. The latter impression is inevitable in all who, like Goethe and Carlyle, make a lofty acquiescence in the positive course of circumstances a prime condition at once of wise endeavor and of genuine happiness."

With the philosophy of England in general and

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rected Carlyle: the sentiment of actuality, which is the positive spirit, and of the sublime, which makes the religious spirit; the first has turned him to real things, the other has furnished him with the interpretation of real things: instead of being sickly and visionary he has become a philosopher and a historian.". Taine. Concerning which very thoughtful remark it should be said that the sentiment of the sublime, which makes the religious spirit, is a Teutonic trait rather than a strictly English one. The "positive spirit" was possessed by Goethe more than by almost any other of the great German thinkers, and Goethe seems more English than any other, save, possibly, Lessing.

MECHANISM AND DOGMATISM.

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in particular with that mechanism, whether of English and French materialism, or Scotch dogmatism, which he was born into, Carlyle's mind had nothing in common. There is no better possible statement than his of the nature of the philosophy against which German idealism rose, and which he himself abjured. This is from the essay on Signs of the Times, which belongs to the very earliest stage of Carlyle's literary life, two years earlier even than Characteristics, four or five years earlier than Sartor Resartus. I am tempted to call this essay, by no means the equal of others in power, the completest expression, in short, of the philosophy of Carlyle. There is almost no principle afterwards developed by him which is not involved in this; and it may be said, in passing, that no truer words upon such subjects as the "Genesis of Genius" are likely to be said in a hurry than Carlyle says here.1

"Consider the state of science generally in

1 Carlyle's "pessimism" all lies in Characteristics, 1831; his politics is well outlined in Corn-Law Rhymes, 1832. He said many things more violently afterwards, as some things in the world about him assumed different hues and proportions; but there is no new philosophy. Add to these three essays that on Downing Street and the second essay on Goethe, the essay entitled Goethe's Works, and they furnish material for a very true conception of Carlyle's philosophy, if ever so inadequate a one. The earlier essays have the advantage over much of Carlyle's later writing, of calmness and the recognition with some explicitness of the validity, in their proper provinces, of opposing principles.

Europe, at this period," he says in this essay on Signs of the Times:<"It is admitted on all sides that the metaphysical and moral sciences are falling into decay, while the physical are engrossing, every day, more respect and attention. In most of the European nations there is now no such thing as a science of mind. The land of Malebranche, Pascal, Descartes, and Fenélon has now only its Cousins and Villemains. Among ourselves, the philosophy of mind, after a rickety infancy, which never reached the vigor of manhood, fell suddenly into decay, languished, and finally died out with its last amiable cultivator, Professor Stewart. In no nation but Germany has any decisive effort been made in psychological science not to speak of any decisive result. The science of the age, in short, is physical, chemical, physiological; in all shapes, mechanical. Our favorite mathematics, the highly prized exponent of all these other sciences, has also become more and more mechanical. Excellence in what is called its higher departments depends less on natural genius than on acquired expertness in wielding its machinery. Without undervaluing the wonderful results which a Lagrange or Laplace educes by means of it, we may remark that their calculus, differential and integral, is little else than a more cunningly constructed arithmetical mill, where the factors being put in are, as it were, ground into the true product, under cover, and without other effort on our part than steady

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ENGLISH EMPIRICISM.

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turning of the handle. We have more mathematics than ever; but less mathesis. Archimedes and Plato could not have read the Mécanique Céleste; but neither would the whole French Institute see aught in that saying, 'God geometrizes!' but a sentimental rhodomontade.

"Nay, our whole metaphysics itself, from Locke's time downwards, has been physical; not a spiritual philosophy, but a material one. The singular estimation in which his Essay was so long held as a scientific work will one day be thought a curious indication of the spirit of these times. His whole doctrine is mechanical, in its aim and origin, in its method and its results. It is not a philosophy of the mind: it is a mere discussion concerning the origin of our consciousness, or ideas, or whatever else they are called; a genetic history of what we see in the mind. The grand secrets of necessity and freewill, of the mind's vital or nonvital dependence on matter, of our mysterious relations to time and space, to God, to the universe, are not, in the faintest degree, touched on in these inquiries, and seem not to have the smallest connection with them.

"The last class of our Scotch metaphysicians had a dim notion that much of this was wrong; but they knew not how to right it. The school of Reid had also from the first taken a mechanical course, not seeing any other. The singular conclusions at which Hume, setting out from their ad

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