necessary to the apprehension of
reality, which he felt as early as 1794, was strengthened by his study
of the German transcendental philosophers, and in March 1801 he writes,
"My opinion is that deep thinking is attainable only by a man of deep
feeling; and that all truth is a species of Revelation."

Coleridge, following Kant, gave the somewhat misleading name of "reason"
(as opposed to "understanding") to the intuitive power by which man
apprehends God directly, and, in his view, imagination is the faculty,
which in the light of this intuitive reason interprets and unifies the
symbols of the natural world. Hence its value, for it alone gives man
the key

Of that eternal language, which thy God
Utters, who from eternity doth teach
Himself in all, and all things in himself.[49]

Carlyle's mysticism is the essence of his being, it flames through his
amazing medley of writings, it guides his studies and his choice of
subjects, it unifies and explains his visions, his thought, and his
doctrines. His is a mystical attitude and belief of a perfectly simple
and broad kind, including no abstruse subtleties of metaphysical
speculation, as with Coleridge, but based on one or two deeply rooted
convictions. This position seems to have been reached by him partly
through intellectual conflict which found relief and satisfaction in the
view of life taken by Goethe, Fichte, and other German "transcendental"
thinkers; but partly also through a definite psychical experience which
befell him in Edinburgh when he was twenty-six, and which from that day
changed for him the whole of his outlook on life. He speaks of it
himself as "a Spiritual New-birth, or Baphometic Fire-baptism." It came
to him after a period of great wretchedness, of torture with doubt and
despair, and--what is significant--"during three weeks of total
sleeplessness." These are conditions which would be likely to reduce his
body to the state of weakness and sensitiveness which seems often
antecedent to psychic experience. He has given an account of the
incident in _Sartor_ (Book ii. chap, vii.), when, he says, "there rushed
like a stream of fire over my whole soul; and I shook base Fear away
from me for ever. I was strong, of unknown strength; a spirit, almost a
god." The revelation seems to have been of the nature of a certainty and
assertion of his own inherent divinity, his "native God-created
majesty," freedom and potential greatness. This brought wi