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that crotchety and choleric Scotchman to come over and teach us philosophy. He believed this prophet of Hegel the only man capable of teaching Britain metaphysics and ethics.1

In his general mental constitution, Carlyle was far more like Fichte than any other of the German philosophers, -like him in his almost complete absorption in the ethical, and his interest in the speculative only for its ethical bearings; like him in the predominance in him of the prophet and the preacher; like him in his arbitrary and uncompromising character; like him in his absolute confidence in justice and the omnipotence of the ideal, along with thorough discontent with the actual state

1 A passage in the letter which Carlyle wrote to Dr. Stirling, when the latter was a candidate for the chair of Moral Philosophy in Edinburgh, in 1868, is so interesting on several accounts, that it is well to quote it here: "I wish to add that I think you not only the one man in Britain capable of bringing metaphysical philosophy, in the ultimate, German or European, and highest actual form of it, distinctly home to the understanding of British men who wish to understand it, but that I notice in you, further, on the moral side, a sound strength of intellectual discernment, a noble valor and reverence of mind, which seem to me to mark you out as the man capable of doing us the highest service in ethical science too; that of restoring or decisively beginning to restore, the doctrine of morals to what I must ever reckon its one true and everlasting basis (namely, the Divine or supersensual one), and thus of victoriously reconciling and rendering identical the latest dictates of modern science with the earliest dawnings of wisdom among the race of men."

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of things about him. Of all German philosophical books, the one which Carlyle might most naturally have written is The Vocation of Man. The third part of that great work might be substituted for the third part of Sartor Resartus, without much disturbing any unity. In Teufelsdröckh's movement from his Sorrows to the Everlasting No, the Centre of Indifference and the Everlasting Yea, almost the same road is traveled over which Fichte passes from Doubt to Knowledge and to Faith,which Faith is the certitude of Kant's practical reason. Carlyle's own portrait of Fichte contains much that must needs go into any portrait of himself," the colossal, adamantine spirit, standing erect and clear, like a Cato Major among degenerate men; fit to have been the teacher of the Stoa, and to have discoursed of beauty and virtue in the groves of Academe! So robust an intellect, a soul so calm, so lofty, massive, and immovable, has not mingled in philosophical discussion since the time of Luther. The man rises before us, amid contradiction and debate, like a granite mountain amid clouds and wind. Ridicule, of the best that could be commanded, has been already tried against him; but it could not avail. What was the wit of a thousand wits to him? The cry of a thousand choughs assaulting that old cliff of granite; seen from the summit, these, as they winged the midway air, showed scarce so gross as beetles, and their cry was seldom even audible."

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Fichte's philosophy took its departure from Kant's Practical Reason, and it is in the immediate and absolute conviction of duty that, at the last, he still finds his principle of certitude. "There is but one thing that I may know, namely, what I ought to do; and this I always know infallibly. Concerning all else I know nothing, and know that I know nothing. I firmly root myself in this, and do not harass and exhaust myself with vain conjectures about that which I know nothing of. All that happens belongs to the plan of the eternal world, and is good in its place- thus much I know; but what in this place is pure good and what only a means for the removal of some existing evil; what is merely germ, what blossom, and what fruit, or what ought to afford me more or less satisfaction, I know not. I do know that I live in a world which belongs to the supreme wisdom and goodness, who thoroughly comprehends its plan, and will infallibly accomplish it; and in this conviction I rest."

This conviction, too, was the rest, the principle of certitude, the Everlasting Yea, which ended the despair of Teufelsdröckh.1 "Es leuchtet mir ein, I see a glimpse of it!" he cries.

"There is in

1 It was the moral side of Kant's philosophy which chiefly appealed to Carlyle, as to Fichte. "The noble system of morality, the purer theology, the lofty views of man's nature derived from Kant's philosophy," - this from the early essay on the State of German Literature, – "nay, perhaps the very dis

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man a Higher than love of happiness: he can do without happiness, and instead thereof find blessedness! Was it not to preach forth this same Higher that sages and martyrs, the poet and the priest, in all times, have spoken and suffered, bearing testimony, through life and through death, of the godlike that is in man, and how in the godlike only has he strength and freedom? ... On the roaring billows of time thou art not engulfed, but borne aloft into the azure of eternity. Love not pleasure; love God. This is the Everlasting Yea,

wherein all contradiction is solved."

Well this is the Everlasting Yea. The consciousness of duty is as immediate as the intuition of time or space, or as any sensation; and duty implies freedom, and freedom implies the transcendental,- immortality and God. A moral imperative

cussion of such matters, to which it gave so strong an impetus, have told with remarkable influence on the whole spiritual character of Germany. No writer of any importance in that country, be he acquainted or not with the Critical Philosophy, but breathes a spirit of devoutness and elevation more or less directly drawn from it. Such men as Goethe and Schiller cannot exist without effect in any literature or in any century; but if one circumstance more than another has contributed to forward their endeavors and introduce that higher tone into the literature of Germany, it has been this philosophical system; to which, in wisely believing its results, or even in wisely denying them, all that was lofty and pure in the genius of poetry or the reason of man so readily allied itself." See also the discussion of Kant, and German idealism generally, in the essay on Novalis.

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so strong as to demand the canceling of life itself, - of individuality, if individuality be only some thing finite and phenomenal, is the absolute assurance that individuality really belongs to an ideal realm paramount to the phenomenal. No utilitarian rigmarole about boiled-down and trebly-distilled and compressed heredity can ever invalidate this, without making the martyr, in the last analysis, an irrational person and striking at the roots of that principle of self-sacrifice which is the prime condition of social life, as well as of individual growth, and any continued neglect of which is always duly avenged by its own despotic reassertion of itself through blood and iron.

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But here comes the consideration which to the philosophic thinker is the important one in this matter:- That is, that everything argued from the moral imperative beyond the simple fact of freedom is strictly inferential, the deliverance of logic. The freedom is the only thing immediately given to consciousness; the transcendental - substance, form of eternity—is inferred, necessarily inferred, doubtless, but inferred, the result of a logical process. When Fichte says, "I know infallibly what I ought to do, and I know nothing else, and know that I know nothing," and then goes on to talk as he does of immortality and God, an Absolute Wisdom and Goodness, he falls into an inconsistency which it is astonishing that so acute a mind as his should have been unconscious of. Had Fichte cared for

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