proportions. If we reflect on the conditions out of which
ordinary opinion is generated, we may well be startled at the profuse
liberality with which names of the widest and most complex and variable
significance are bestowed on all hands. The majority of the ideas which
constitute most men's intellectual stock-in-trade have accrued by
processes quite distinct from fair reasoning and consequent conviction.
This is so notorious, that it is amazing how so many people can go on
freely and rapidly labelling thinkers or writers with names which they
themselves are not competent to bestow, and which their hearers are not
competent either to understand generally, or to test in the specific
instance.'

These labels are rather more worthless than usual in the present case,
because Mr. Carlyle is ostentatiously illogical and defiantly
inconsistent; and, therefore, the term which might correctly describe
one side of his teaching or belief would be tolerably sure to give a
wholly false impression of some of its other sides. The qualifications
necessary to make any one of the regular epithets fairly applicable
would have to be so many, that the glosses would virtually overlay the
text. We shall be more likely to reach an instructive appreciation by
discarding such substitutes for examination, and considering, not what
pantheistic, absolutist, transcendental, or any other doctrine means, or
what it is worth, but what it is that Mr. Carlyle means about men, their
character, their relations to one another, and what that is worth.

With most men and women the master element in their opinions is
obviously neither their own reason nor their own imagination,
independently exercised, but only mere use and wont, chequered by
fortuitous sensations, and modified in the better cases by the
influence of a favourite teacher; while in the worse the teacher is the
favourite who happens to chime in most harmoniously with prepossessions,
or most effectually to nurse and exaggerate them. Among the superior
minds the balance between reason and imagination is scarcely ever held
exactly true, nor is either firmly kept within the precise bounds that
are proper to it. It is a question of temperament which of the two
mental attitudes becomes fixed and habitual, as it is a question of
temperament how violently either of them straitens and distorts the
normal faculties of vision. The man who prides himself on a hard head,
which would usually be better descr