pierce to its central core.

[6] _Positive._ No English lexicon as yet seems to justify the use of
this word in one of the senses of the French _positif_, as when a
historian, for instance, speaks of the _esprit positif_ of Bonaparte. We
have no word, I believe, that exactly corresponds, so perhaps _positive_
with that significance will become acclimatised. A distinct and separate
idea of this particular characteristic is indispensable.

Eager for a firm foothold, yet wholly revolted by the too narrow and
unelevated positivity of the eighteenth century; eager also for some
recognition of the wide realm of the unknowable, yet wholly unsatisfied
by the transcendentalism of the English and Scotch philosophic
reactions; he found in Goethe that truly free and adequate positivity
which accepts all things as parts of a natural or historic order, and
while insisting on the recognition of the actual conditions of this
order as indispensable, and condemning attempted evasions of such
recognition as futile and childish, yet opens an ample bosom for all
forms of beauty in art, and for all nobleness in moral aspiration. That
Mr. Carlyle has reached this high ground we do not say. Temperament has
kept him down from it. But it is after this that he has striven. The
tumid nothingness of pure transcendentalism he has always abhorred. Some
of Mr. Carlyle's favourite phrases have disguised from his readers the
intensely practical turn of his whole mind. His constant presentation
of the Eternities, the Immensities, and the like, has veiled his almost
narrow adherence to plain record without moral comment, and his often
cynical respect for the dangerous, yet, when rightly qualified and
guided, the solid formula that What is, is. The Eternities and
Immensities are only a kind of awful background. The highest souls are
held to be deeply conscious of these vast unspeakable presences, yet
even with them they are only inspiring accessories; the true interest
lies in the practical attitude of such men towards the actual and
palpable circumstances that surround them. This spirituality, whose
place in Mr. Carlyle's teaching has been so extremely mis-stated, sinks
wholly out of sight in connection with such heroes as the coarse and
materialist Bonaparte, of whom, however, the hero-worshipper in earlier
pieces speaks with some laudable misgiving, and the not less coarse and
materialist Frederick, about whom no misgiving is permitted to the loyal
dis