ought to be, the source of material life to the prehend those beautiful words of St. Paul state in all its members: the intellectual an- (Romans xii. 5), "We being many, are one archy to which we are a prey, has shown us body in Christ, and every one members one of

that liberty of conscience does not suffice to render religion the source of moral life to the state in all its members. We have begun to suspect, not only that there is upon the earth something greater, more holy, more divine, than the individual, collective Humanity, an existence always living, learning, advancing toward God, of which we are but the instruments, but that it is alone from the summit of this collective idea, from the conception of the Universal Mind, " of which," as Emerson says, "each individual man is one more incarnation," that we can derive our function, the rule of our life, the ideal of our societies. We labor at this at the present day. It signifies little that our first essays are strange aberrations: it signifies little, that falling upon their weak side, the doctrines of St. Simon, of Owen, of Fourier, and others, who have arisen or shall arise,

another." We resolve the incertitude and caprices of individuals into a universality: we seek the intelligence and harmonizing of persons in the collective mass. Such is the tendency of the present times, and whosoever does not labor in accordance with it, necessarily remains behind.

Mr. Carlyle comprehends only the individual; the true sense of the unity of the human race escapes him. He sympathizes with all men, but it is with the life of each one, and not with their collective life. He readily looks at every man as the representative, the incarnation, in a manner, of an idea; he does not believe in a "supreme idea," represented progressively by the development of mankind taken as a whole. He feels forcibly (rather indeed by the instinct of his heart, which revolts at actual evil, than by a clear conception of that which constitutes life) the

may be condemned to ridicule. That which want of a bond between the men who are is important is the idea common to all these around him; he does not feel sufficiently the doctrines, and the breath of which has ren-existence of the bond between the generadered them fruitful; it is the object which tions past, present, and future. The great they all instinctively propose, the starting- religious thought, the continued development

point they take. Half a century ago, all the boldest and most innovating theories sought in the organization of societies guarantees for free individual action; society was fundamentally only the power of all directed to the support of the rights of each: at the present day, the most timid reformers start with a social principle to define the part of the individual, with the admission of a law, to seek what may be its best interpreter and its best application. What, in the political

of Humanity by a collective labor, according to an educational plan assigned by Providence, fore-felt from age to age by a few rare intellects, and proclaimed in the last fifty years by the greatest European thinkers, finds but a feeble echo, or rather no echo at all, in his soul. Progressive from an impulse of feeling, he shrinks back from the idea as soon as he sees it stated explicitly and systematically; and such expressions as "the progress of the species" and "perfectibility" world, are all these tendencies to centraliza- never drop from his pen unaccompanied by a tion, to universal suffrage, to the annihilation taint of irony, which we confess is to us inex

of castes? Whence arise, in the religious world, all these discontents, all these reversions toward the past, all these aspirations toward a future, confused, uncertain, but wide, tolerant, and reconciliatory of creeds at present opposed? Why is history, which in old times was satisfied with relating the deeds of princes or of ruling bodies of men, directed at the present day so much to the masses, and why does it feel the want of descending

plicable. He seems to regard the human race rather as an aggregate of similar individuals, distinct powers in juxtaposition, than as an association of laborers, distributed in groups, and impelled on different paths toward one single object. Nation itself, country, -the second collective existence, less vast, but still for many centuries not less sacred than humanity, -vanishes, or is modified under his hand: it is no longer the sign

from the summits of society to its base? of our portion of labor in the common work, And what means that word Progress, which, the workshop in which God has placed the understood in a thousand ways, is yet found instruments of labor to fulfil the mission most on every lip, and becomes more from day to within our reach; it is no longer the symbol day the watchword of all labors? We thirst of a thought, of a special vocation to be folfor unity: we seek it in a new and larger ex-lowed, indicated by the tradition of the race, pression of the mutual responsibility of all by the affinity of tendencies, by the unity of men towards each other, the indissoluble language, by the character of localities; it is copartnery of all generations and all individu- something reduced, as much as possible, to als in the human race. We begin to com- the proportions of the individual. The nationality of Italy is the glory of having pro-occasion to trace the history of this doctrine, duced Dante and Christopher Columbus; which, treated as it still is with neglect, the nationality of Germany that of having reckons nevertheless amongst its followers

given birth to Luther, to Goethe, and to others. The shadow thrown by these gigantic men appears to eclipse to his view every trace of the national thought of which these men were only the interpreters or prophets, and of the people, who alone are its depositary. All generalization is so repugnant to Mr. Carlyle, that he strikes at the root of the error as he deems it, by declaring that the history of the world is fundamentally nothing more than the biography of great men ('Lectures'). This is to plead, distinctly enough, the falseness of the

men who bore the names of Dante, of Bacon, and of Leibnitz. We can at present only mark the existence of the contrary doctrine in the writings of Mr. Carlyle, and the consequences to which, in our opinion, it leads him. It is evident that, of the two criteria of certainty, individual conscience and universal tradition, between which mankind has hitherto perpetually fluctuated, and the reconcilement of which appears to us to constitute the only means we possess of recognizing truth, Mr. Carlyle adopts one alone-the

idea which rules the movement of the times.* first. He rejects, or at least wholly neglects, We protest, in the name of the democratic the other. From this point, in his view, all spirit of the age, against such ideas. Histo- follows in a natural connexion: individualiry is not the biography of great men: the ty being every thing, the doctrine of unconhistory of mankind is the history of the pro- sciousness follows. The voice of God is gressive religion of mankind, and of the heard in the intuition, in the instincts of the translation by symbols, or external actions, soul: to separate the individuality from every of that religion. The great men of the earth human external agency, and to offer it in na

are but the marking-stones on the road of humanity; they are the priests of its religion. What priest is equal in the balance to the whole religion of which he is a minister? There is yet something greater, more divine

tive purity to the breath of inspiration from above, this is to prepare a temple to God; God and the individual man-Mr. Carlyle sees no other object in the world. But how can the individual alone approach God, unly mysterious, than all the great men, and less by transport, by enthusiasm, by the unthis is the earth which bears them, the hu- premeditated upward flight of the spirit, unman race which includes them, the thought shackled by method or calculation? Hence of God which stirs within them, and which arises all Mr. Carlyle's antipathy to the la

the whole human race collectively can alone accomplish. Disown not, then, the common mother for the sake of certain of her children, however privileged they may be; for at the same time that you disown her, you will lose the intellect of these rare men whom you admire. Genius 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 crowds of common mortals, from whose life it springs. No one is gifted with a right comprehension of it, without studying the medium in which it lives.

We cannot, however, here attempt to establish any positive ideas respecting the vocation of our epoch, or the doctrine of the collective progress which appears to us to characterize it: perhaps we may one day take an

* This is the essence of Mr. Carlyle's ideas,

they appear to us to be deducible froin the body of his views and opinions and the general spirit which breathes in his works. Of course we meet here and there with passages in opposition to this spirit, and in accordance with that of the age. It is im possible for a writer of Mr. Carlyle's stamp to avoid

bors of philosophy; they must appear to him like the efforts of a Titan with the strength of a pigmy. Of what avail are the poor analytical and experimental faculties of the individual intellect, in the solution of this immense and infinite problem? Hence, likewise, his bitter and often violent censure of all those who labor against the social state as it exists. Victory may indeed justify them, for victory is the intervention of God by his decree, from which there is no appeal; but where is the man who can pretend to fore-calculate, to determine this decree? What avails it to fill the echoes with complaint, like Philoctetes? What avails it to contend convulsively in a powerless struggle? What is, is. All our endeavors will not alter it before the time decreed; that time God alone determines. What is to happen God will bring to pass, very probably by wholly different means from those which we, feeble and ephemeral creatures, may imagine. Point out the evil, calmly, wisely; then resign yourself, trust, and wait! There is a deep discouragement, a very despair, at the bottom of all that bold fervor of belief which characterizes many of Mr. Carlyle's pages. To us he seems to

this; but we do not think we can accused, if our remarks are read with attention, of unfaithful- seek God rather as a refuge, than as the ness in the material point. source of right and of power; from his lips,

•

at times so daring, we seem to hear every ject to be attained; it matters little that the instant the cry of the Breton mariner-" My result of our action be lost in a distance God, protect me! my bark is so small and which is beyond our calculation; we know the ocean so vast!"

that the powers of millions of men, our breth

Now all this is partly true, and neverthe-ren, will succeed to the work after us, in the

less it is all partly false; true, inasmuch as it is the legitimate consequence from Mr. Carlyle's starting-point; false, in a higher and more comprehensive point of view. If we derive all our ideas of human affairs and labors from the notion of the individual, and see only in social life "the aggregate of all the individual men's lives"-in history only "the essence of innumerable biographies"* -if we always place man, singly, isolated, in presence of the universe and of God, we shall have full reason to hold the language of Mr.

same track, we know that the object attained, be it when it may, will be the result of all our efforts combined.

The object-an object to be pursued collectively, an ideal to be realized as far as possible here below, by the association of all our faculties and all our powers" operatio humanæ universitatis," as Dante says in a work little known, or misunderstood, in which, five centuries ago, he laid down many of the principles upon which we are laboring at the present day-" ad quam ipsa universitas

Carlyle. If all philosophy be in fact, like hominum in tantâ multitudine ordinatur, ad that of the ancient schools, merely a simple quam quidem operationem nec homo unus, physiological studyof the individual, -an anal- nec domus una, nec vicinia, nec una civitas, ysis, more or less complete, of his faculties, nec regnum particulare, pertingere potest"* -of what use is it, but as a kind of intellect--this alone gives value and method to the ual gymnastics? If our powers be limited life and acts of the individual. Mr. Carlyle to such as each one of us may acquire by him- seems to us almost always to forget this. Beself, between those moments of our earthly ing thus without a sound criterion whereby to career which we call birth and death, they estimate individual acts, he is compelled to are indeed enough to attain the power of value them rather by the power which has guessing and of expressing a small fragment been expended upon them, by the energy and ofthe truth: let him who can realize it here. perseverance which they betray, than by the

But if we place ourselves in the point of view of the collective existence, Mankind, and regard social life as the continued development of an idea by the life all its individuals, -if we regard history as the relation of this development in time and space through the works of individuals; if we believe in the copartnery and mutual responsibility of genera

nature of the object toward which they are directed, and their relation to that object. Hence arises that kind of indifference which makes him, we will not say esteem, but love, equally men whose whole life has been spent in pursuing contrary objects,-Johnson and Cromwell, for example. Hence proceeds that spirit of fatalism (to call things by their

tions, never losing sight of the fact that the right names) which remotely pervades his life of the individual is his development, in a work on the French Revolution; which medium fashioned by the labors of all the in- makes him sympathize so much with bold

dividuals who have preceded him, and that the powers of the individual are his powers grafted upon those of all foregoing humanity, -all our ideas will change. Philosophy will appear to us as the science of the law of life, as "the soul " (Mr. Carlyle himself once uses this expression in contradiction to the

deeds, admire ability, under whatever form displayed, and so often hail, at the risk of becoming an advocate of despotism, might as the token of right. He desires undoubtedly the good every where and always; but he desires it, from whatever quarter it may come -from above or from below, imposed by

general spirit of his works), "of which reli- power, or proclaimed by the free and sponta

gion, worship, is the body;" and the complaint neous impulse of the multitude; and he forof the intellect, so often looked upon as idle, gets that the good is above all a moral quesfrom Byron down to George Sand, will be to tion; that there is no good apart from the us, what it is in truth, the registered, effica- consciousness of good that it exists only cious protest of the spirit, tormented by pre- where it is made, not obtained, by man: he sentiments of the future, against a present forgets that we are not machines for produccorrupted and destroyed; and we shall feel tion, from which as much work as possible is that it is not only our right, but our duty, to to be extracted, but free agents, called to incarnate our thought in action. For it stand or fall by our works. His theory of matters little that our individual powers be unconsciousness, the germ of which appears in of the smallest amount in relation to the ob the 'Life of Schiller,' and is clearly defined in his essay 'Characteristics,' although at | We know there are many men who pretend, first view it may indeed appear to acknow- without right and without reality, that they ledge human spontaneity, yet does emphati- already possess a complete knowledge of the cally involve its oblivion, and sacrifices, in its application, the social object to an individual point of view.

means. Is it this that he attacks? If so, let him attack the premature cry of triumph, the pride, not the plaint. This is but the sign of suffering, and a stimulus to research: it is doubly sacred.

Genius is not, generally speaking, unconscious of what it experiences or of what it is capable. It is not the suspended harp which sounds (as the statue of Memnon in the desert sounds in the sun) at the changing unfore--for whatever we may do, the words, "the

seen breath of wind that sweeps across its strings: it is the conscious power of the soul of a man, rising from amidst his fellow-men, believing and calling himself a son of God,

Doubly sacred, we say, and to murmur at the plaint is both unjust and vain; vain,

whole creation groaneth," of the apostle whom we love to quote will be verified the most forcibly in the choicest intellects, whenever an entire order of things and ideas shall

of the evil, and prevent attention being awakened to it. Suffer in silence, do you say? no, cry aloud upon the housetops, sound the

an apostle of eternal truth and beauty upon be exhausted; whenever, in Mr. Carlyle's the earth, the privileged worshipper of an ideal phrase, there shall exist no longer any social as yet concealed from the majority: he is faith:-unjust, for while on one side it atalmost always sufficiently tormented by his tacks those who suffer the most, on the other contemporaries, to need a compensation- it would suppress that which is the symptom that of feeling his life in the generations to come. Cæsar, Christopher Columbus, were not unconscious: Dante, when, at the opening of the twenty-fifth chapter of the 'Para- tocsin, raise the alarm at all risks, for it is diso,' he hurled at his enemies that sublime not alone your house that is on fire, but that menace, which commentators without heart of your neighbor, that of every one. and without head have mistaken for a cry of supplication, Kepler, when he wrote, "My personal; it is an error and a fault, when the book will await its reader: has not God waited six thousand years before he created a man to contemplate his works?"*-Shakspeare himself, when he wrote, "And nothing stands

*

*

*

And yet, to times in hope, my verse shall stand't -these men were not unconscious: but even

Silence

is frequently a duty, when suffering is only

suffering is that of millions. Can we possibly imagine that this complaining, this expression of unrest and discontent which at the present day bursts out on every side, is only the effect of the personal illusions of a few egoistical writers? Do we imagine that there can be any pleasure in parading one's own real sufferings before the public? It is more pleasant to cause smiles than tears in those around us. But there are times in which every oracle utters words of ill omen; the heavens are veiled, evil is every where; how should it not be in the heart of those, whose life vibrates most at the trembling of the universal life? What! after proving the evil every instant in our pages, after showing society advancing through moral anarchy and devoid of belief towards its dissolution, can we expect

had they been so, even were genius always unconscious, the question lies not there. It is not the consciousness of 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 we 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 themselves, who have transferred to stone the aspiration of their souls towards the features to remain calm? are we astonishheaven, and have bequeathed to us Christian ed if the voice trembles, if the soul shudders? cathedrals, without even graving their names Human thought is disquieted; it questions on a corner-stone. What then becomes of itself, listens to itself, studies itself: this is the anathema hurled by Mr. Carlyle at phi- evidently not its normal state. Be it so: but losophy? What becomes of the sentence what is to be done? must we abolish thought, passed with so much bitterness against the -deny the intellect the right, the duty of restless complaints of contemporary writers? studying itself, when it is sick? This is in

What is philosophy but the science of ends?
And is that which he calls the disease of the
times, at the bottom aught else than the con-
sciousness of a new object, not yet attained?
* Harmonices Mundi: libri quinque.
† Sonnets, 60. See also Sonnets 17, 18, 55, 63,
81, etc.

deed the result of the essay on 'Characteristics,' one of Mr. Carlyle's most remarkable works. The first part is truly admirable; the evil is there perfectly charactered and the principal symptoms described; but the conclusion is most lame and impotent. It ends by suppressing (how, is not indicated) the disquietude, or what he terms the "self-sen- and when the human intelligence should beripe tience," the "self-survey," the consciousness. for a higher initiation. When this period ar

of a heroic man; above all, in the words of all points on the infinite; this we know well, genius and at the bottom of your heart, freed but is it enough to know this? have we not from all egoistic passions. God is every to march onwards, to advance into this infiwhere: learn to find him. You are surround- nite? But can the individual finite creature ed by his mira les; you swim in the Infinite: of a day do this, if he relies only upon his

every generous, great, divine emotion in the misanthropy. Not identifying themselves human heart, against material appetites and sufficiently with mankind, and startled at the selfish instincts. These men have been lis- disproportion between the object and the tened to; mankind has believed: it has, dur-means, they have ended by viewing every ing several centuries, done great and good where death and annihilation, and have no things in the name of its creeds. Then it has longer had courage for the conflict. The stopped, and ceased to produce. Why so? ideal has appeared to them like a tremenWas the thing it had believed, false? No, it dous irony.

In truth, human life regarded from a a fragment of absolute truth, combined with merely individual point of view is a melanmany truths relative to time and place, destin-choly thing. Glory, power, grandeur, all ed to disappear after having borne their fruit, perish, -playthings of a day, broken at night.