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they been so, even were genius always unconscious, the question lies not there. It is not the consciousness of his own genius that is important to a man, but of that which he proposes to do: it is the consciousness of the object, and not that of the means, which I assert to be indispensable, whenever man has any great thing to accomplish. This consciousness pervaded all the great men who have embodied their thought, the artists of the middle ages who have transferred to stone the aspiration of their souls towards heaven, and have bequeathed to us Christian cathedrals without even graving their names on a corner-stone."

It is so too with the history of nations. The memorable epochs, the epochs which have had chief and almost sole attraction for Carlyle himself have been the most intensely self-conscious times, the times when the world came to itself, the Reformation, the time of Knox, of Cromwell and the Puritans, or of Mirabeau. Of the Reformation Carlyle says, "The question, Protestant or not Protestant? meant everywhere, 'Is there anything of nobleness in you, O Nation, or is there nothing?'" Yet to nail theses upon the Wittenberg church door, or to go to Worms to face the emperor was certainly not the duty which "lay nearest to Luther. "The noblest day of Germany for greatness of character and public spirit, since that of the Reformation," says Sterling, " was during the resistance to Napoleon, which followed, and mani

festly in a great degree arose from, the manlier culture furnished by the high philosophy and philosophical poetry of the preceding fifty years. As to the antinomy between heroism and philosophy, and virtue being sickly when it can be philosophized of, Sterling points out that Socrates philosophized of virtue along with the Sophists, and that Christ was the great preacher of the truth which he realized in his life. "The great Athenian teacher of virtue was not less, but far more virtuous than any of those who scoffed at him, - far more heroic as a citizen, as a soldier, as a man, than those who would have returned to the old unthinking days of merely manual heroism. Cicero was hardly a worse man than Clodius or Catiline, who wrote no books De Officiis. Seneca was not the most earnest of seekers after truth; but it would have been well for Rome and for the world, had he, not Nero, ruled the empire. It was Marcus Aurelius, and not Commodus, who wrote the Meditations which have supplied the motto to the History of the French Revolution."

What is the net result of this examination of Characteristics, and of every such examination? First, that there is a healthy consciousness and an unhealthy consciousness, neither of which is unconsciousness; and secondly, that it is by means of pains that humanity is moved to reflection and successive advances and expansions. The process of mind is from consciousness through an uncon

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sciousness which itself creates and sustains to a reflex consciousness, like the process of the vital sap through the wood which itself creates to the fruitage and the living seed like the seed at the roots, the final point in the process, and no intermediate point, being nearest the beginning.1 Men study the umbilicus instead of the poet, and the Fiji Islander instead of the Commonwealth, to find out God. They make a mistake.

Carlyle did not of course attribute the disease of society to the sensation that there is a disease. "The Encyclopedists," he said, "did not produce the troubles of France; but the troubles of France produced the encyclopedists and much else. The self-consciousness is the symptom of disease merely; nay, it is also the symptom and sole means of restoration and cure." And here Carlyle parts from the pessimist, and shows us that the unconsciousness which he is talking about is the very antipode of the unconsciousness of Schopenhauer and Hartmann. The unconsciousness of genius is simply the healthiest, freest and most clarified consciousness, the condition of the highest activity, not the cessation of activity, nor Nirvana. Society, Carlyle

1 "It begins now to be everywhere surmised,” says Carlyle in his paper on the Death of Goethe, "that the real force, which in this world all things must obey, is insight, spiritual vision, and determination. The thought is parent of the deed, nay, is living soul of it, and last and continual as well as first mover of it."

says, however sick to-day, is never sick to dissolution, for it is by nature immortal, and its death is ever a new birth. "Out of all evil comes good; and no good that is possible but shall one day be real. Deep and sad as is our feeling that we stand yet in the bodeful night, equally deep and indestructible is our assurance that the morning also will not fail." This faith gives us strength and inward willingness in the thickest gloom and difficulty. Man is altogether miserable only when "he feels himself crushed under the Juggernaut wheels and knows that Juggernaut is no divinity, but a dead mechanical idol." Such a Juggernaut is the world of Schopenhauer, and such a world, "an iron ignoble circle of necessity," driving out freedom and Godhead, is what Carlyle will know nothing of. The very climax of Carlyle's condemnation of the age is reached in the assertion that "Freewill, so far as may be, has abdicated and withdrawn into the dark, and a spectral nightmare of a Necessity usurps its throne,”—which is a stroke at the very first principle of pessimism.

This seems to me to be the truth about Carlyle : Hopeful by original temperament, and a true optimist in philosophy, his high ideals, and his disordered body induce too gloomy impressions of the badness of the present, which impressions become still more exaggerated by his giving full rein to his tremendous power of painting the bad, till suddenly his philosophy steps in and violently checks

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the process. This seems to me to be strikingly illustrated in Characteristics, itself. One can almost believe that Carlyle did not know where he was going to bring up, when he began the essay, but that the counter-irritant developed as he continued to write. "Had Adam remained in Paradise," he says, with evident longing for Eden, "there had been no anatomy, and no metaphysics ;" and we are tempted to tell him there would have been no literature of any sort, no history, — which indeed the pessimist would have counted so much good fortune, but which Carlyle would look upon as rather lamentable. To say that we have a clear conscience," he says, "is to utter a solecism; had we never sinned, we should have had no conscience;" and we are about to tell him hotly that the brutes have no conscience and to furbish up all our trite things about virtue being better than innocence when he steals all our thunder and our occupation is gone. It was a good thing after all that Adam was expelled, and the "fall,” if we consider it deeply enough, was a fall upwards. "Man's highest and sole blessedness," he says, "is, that he toil, and know what to toil at; not in ease, but in united victorious labor, which is at once evil and the victory over evil, does his freedom lie." And more explicitly, "Evil, what we call evil, must ever exist while man exists: evil, in the widest sense we can give it, is precisely the dark disordered material out of which man's freewill has