could no longer keep hold of the Supernatural. In Transcendentalism, Carlyle found salvation.

What are the leading conceptions of the German form of salvation? The answer to this will give the key to Sartor Resartus, and to Carlyle's whole mental outlook. In the eyes of thinkers like Carlyle, the great objection to Christianity was the breach it made between the natural and the supernatural. Between them there was a great gulf which could only fitfully and temporarily be bridged by the miraculous. Students who were being inoculated with scientific ideas of law and order, were bewildered by a theory of life which had no organic relation to the great germinal ideas of the day. In their desire to abolish the supernatural, the French thinkers constructed a theory of Nature in which everything, from the movements of solar masses to the movements of the soul, were interpreted in terms of matter. By adopting a mechanical view of the Universe, the French thinkers robbed Nature of much of its charm, and stunted the emotions on the side of wonder and admiration. The world was reduced to a vast machine, man himself being simply a temporary embodiment of material particles in a highly complex and unique form. Instead of being what it was to the Greeks, a temple of beauty, the Universe to the materialist resembled a prison in which the walls gradually closed upon the poor wretch till he was crushed under the ruins. Goethe has left on record the impression made upon him by the materialistic view of life. As he says, 'The materialistic theory, which reduces all things to matter and motion, appeared to me so grey, so Cimmerian, and so dead that we shuddered at it as at a ghost.'

Sartor Resartus is studded with vigorous protests against the mechanical view of Nature and Man. Just as distasteful to Carlyle, and equally mechanical in spirit, was the Deistical conception of Nature as a huge clock, under the superintendence of a Divine clock-maker, whose duty consisted in seeing that the clock kept good time and was in all respects thoroughly reliable. The Germans attacked the problem from the other side. They did not abolish the supernatural with the materialists, or seek it in another world with the theologians; they found the supernatural in the natural. To the materialists, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Goethe had one reply:—Reduce matter to its constituent atoms, they argued, and you never seize the principle of life; it evades you like a spirit; in this principle everything lives and moves and has its being. German philosophy from Kant has been occupied in attempts to trace the spiritual principle in the great process of cosmic evolution. In poetry, Goethe attempted to represent this as the energising principle of life and duty. The spiritual cannot be weighed in the scales of logic; it refuses to be put upon the dissecting-table. As a consequence, the truth of things is best seen by the poet. The owl-like logic-chopper, from his mechanical and utilitarian standpoint, sees not the Divine vision. This has been called Pantheism. Call it what we please, it is contradictory to Deism and Materialism, and is the root thought of Sartor Resartus, which may be taken as Carlyle's Confession of Faith. A few extracts will justify the foregoing analysis. The transcendental view of Nature is expressed by Carlyle thus:—'Atheistic science babbles poorly of it with scientific nomenclature, experiments and what not, as if it were a poor dead thing, to be bottled up in Leyden jars, and sold over counter; but the native sense of man in all times, if he will himself apply his sense, proclaims it to be a living thing—ah, an unspeakable, God-like thing, towards which the best attitude for us, after never so much science, is awe, devout prostration and humility of soul, worship, if not in words, then in silence.' Here, again, is a passage quite Hegelian in its tone: 'For Matter, were it never so despicable, is Spirit; the manifestation of Spirit, were it never so honourable, can it be more? The thing Visible, nay, the thing Imagined, the thing in any way conceived as Visible, what is it but a Garment, a Clothing of the higher celestial Invisible, unimaginable, formless, dark with excess of bright.'

The defects of Carlyle, and they are many, take their root in his speculative view of the Universe—a view which demands careful analysis if the student hopes to understand Carlyle's strength and weakness. It is not meant that Carlyle's mind remained anchored to the philosophic idealism of Sartor. In later days he professed contempt for transcendental moonshine, but his contempt was for the form and jargon of the schools, not for the spirit, which dominated Carlyle to the end. After Carlyle passed the early poetic stage, his views took more and more an anthropomorphic mould, till in many of his writings he seems practically a Theist. But at root Carlyle's thought was more Pantheistical than Deistical. What, then, is the German conception of the Ultimate Reality? The German answer grew out of an attempt to get rid of the difficulties propounded by Hume. Hume, the father of all the Empiricists, in giving logical effect to Berkeleyism, concluded that just as we know nothing of the outer world beyond sense impressions, so of the inner world of mind we know nothing beyond mental impressions. We can combine and recombine these impressions as we choose, but from them we cannot deduce any ultimate laws, either of the world or of mind. Hume would not sanction belief in causation as a universal law. All that could be said was that certain things happened in a certain manner so frequently as to give rise to a law of expectation. But this is not to solve, but to evade the problem? We are still driven to ask, What is matter? What is motion? What is force? How do we get our knowledge of the material world, and is that knowledge reliable? These are wide questions that cannot be adequately handled here. It was a favourite argument of Comte and his followers, that man's first conceptions of Nature were necessarily erroneous, because they were anthropomorphic. Theology was, therefore, dethroned without ceremony. But science is as anthropomorphic as theology. We have no guarantee that the great facts of Nature are as we think them. We talk of Force, but our idea of Force is taken from experiences which may have no counterpart in Nature. It is well known, for example, that the secondary qualities of objects, colour, &c., do not exist in Nature. Our personality is so inextricably mixed with the material universe that it is impossible to formulate a philosophy like Naturalism, which makes mind a product of Nature, and which sharply defines the provinces of the two.

But what Naturalism fails to do, Idealism or Transcendentalism promises to perform. Idealism is simply Materialism turned upside down. The only difference between the evolution of Spencer and of Hegel is that the one puts matter, the other mind, first. For all practical purposes, it signifies little whether mind is the temporary embodiment of an idea, or the temporary product of a highly specialised form of matter. In either case, man has no more freedom than the bubble upon the surface of the stream. We may discourse of the bubble as poetically or as practically as we please, the result is the same—absorption in the universal. Hegelianism as much as Naturalism leaves man a prisoner in the hands of Fate. The only difference is, that while Naturalism puts round the prisoner's neck a plain, unpretentious noose, Hegelianism adds fringes and embroidery. If there is no appeal from Nature's dread sentence, the less poetry and embroidery there is about the doleful business the better.

In Sartor Resartus, Carlyle talks finely but vaguely, of the peace which came over his soul