ss, and we have a thinker who will take for
heroes men of mystical tendencies, of strong dominating passions, a
thinker who will value progress not by the increase of worldly comfort,
but by the increase in the number of magnetic, epoch-making
personalities. Naturally, we hear Carlyle remark that the history of the
world is at bottom the history of its great men.

Carlyle's fanatical adoption of intuitionalism has told banefully upon
his work in sociology. Trusting to his inner light, to what we might
call Mystical Quakerism, Carlyle has dispensed with a rational theory of
progress. Before a sociological problem, his attitude is not that of the
patient thinker, but of the hysterical prophet, whose emotions find
outlet in declamatory denunciation. Like the prophets of old, Carlyle
tends towards Pessimism. His golden age is in the past. When _Past and
Present_ appeared, many earnest-minded men, captivated by the style and
spirit of the book, hailed Carlyle as a social reformer. As an attempt
to solve the social problem, _Past and Present_ is not a success.
Carlyle could do no more than tell the modern to return to the spirit of
the feudal period, when the people were led by the aristocracy. It
showed considerable audacity on Carlyle's part to come to the
interpretation of history with no theory of progress, no message to the
world beyond the vaguely declamatory one that those nations will be
turned into hell which forget God. Of what value is such writing as
this, taken from the introduction to his _Cromwell_?:--'Here of our own
land and lineage in English shape were heroes on the earth once more,
who knew in every fibre and with heroic daring laid to heart that an
Almighty Justice does verily rule this world, that it is good to fight
on God's side, and bad to fight on the Devil's side! The essence of all
heroism and veracities that have been or will be.' This is simply a
reproduction of Jewish theocratic ideas; indeed, except for the details,
Carlyle might as readily have written a life of Moses as of Cromwell.
In the eyes of Carlyle, human life was what it was to Bunyan, a kind of
pilgrim's progress; only in the Carlylean creed it is all battle and no
victory, all Valley of Humiliation and no Delectable Mountain.
Naturally, where no stress is laid upon collective action, where
individual reason is depreciated, progress is associated with the rise
of abnormal individualities, men of strong wills like Cromwell and
Frederi