قراءة كتاب Thomas Carlyle

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Thomas Carlyle

Thomas Carlyle

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دار النشر: Project Gutenberg
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when he discovered that the universe was not mechanical but Divine. The peace was not of long duration. What consolation Carlyle derived from Idealism did not appear in his life. What a contrast between the poetic optimism of Sartor and the heavily-charged pessimism of old age, when Carlyle, with wailing pathos, exclaims that God does nothing. Carlyle's life abundantly illustrates the fact that whenever it leaves cloudland, Idealism sinks into scepticism more bitter and gloomy than the unbelief of Naturalism. Carlyle approached the question of the Ultimate Reality from the wrong standpoint. He had no reasoned philosophic creed. A poet, he had the poetic dread of analysis, and his spirit revolted at the spectacle of Nature on the dissecting-table. He waged a life-long warfare against science. As the present writer has elsewhere remarked:—'Carlyle never could tolerate the evolution theory. He always spoke with the utmost contempt of Darwin, and everything pertaining to the development doctrines. It is somewhat startling to find that Carlyle was an evolutionist without knowing it. The antagonism between Carlyle and Spencer disappears on closer inspection. When Carlyle speaks of the universe as in very truth the star-domed city of God, and reminds us that through every crystal and through every grass blade, but most through every living soul, the glory of a present God still beams, he is simply saying in the language of poetry what Spencer says in the language of science, that the world of phenomena is sustained and energised by an infinite Eternal Power. Evolution is as emphatic as Carlyle on the absolute distinction between right and wrong. Carlyle and all the German school confront the evolutionary ethics with the Kantian categorical imperative. Surely the Evolutionists in the matter of an imperative out-rival the Intuitionalists, when, in addition to the dictates of conscience, they can call as a witness and sanction to morality the testimony of all-embracing experience. In his famous saying, Might is Right, Carlyle was unconsciously formulating one aspect of evolutionary ethics. Carlyle did not mean anything so silly as that brute force and ethical sanctions are identical; what he meant was that in the long run Righteousness will prove the mightiest force in the universe. What is this but another version of the Spencerian doctrine of the survival of the fittest, which, in the most highly evolved state of society, will mean the survival of the best? In the highest social state the only Might that will survive will be the Might which is rooted in Right. Carlyle's contemptuous attitude towards science is deeply to be deplored. He waged bitter warfare against the evolution theory, quite oblivious of the fact that by means of it there was revealed a deeper insight into the Power behind Nature, and into the ethical constitution of the universe, than ever entered into the minds of transcendental philosophers.'

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