French Revolution had revolutionised men's thoughts and feelings.
There had been revealed to man the inadequacy of the old Deistical or
Mechanical philosophy, which, spreading from England to France, had
done so much to hasten the revolutionary epoch. Carlyle could find no
spiritual sustenance in the purely mechanical theory of life which was
offered as the substitute for the theory of the Churches. There was
another theory, which had its rise in Germany, and to which Carlyle
clung when he could no longer keep hold of the Supernatural. In
Transcendentalism, Carlyle found salvation.

What are the leading conceptions of the German form of salvation? The
answer to this will give the key to _Sartor Resartus_, and to Carlyle's
whole mental outlook. In the eyes of thinkers like Carlyle, the great
objection to Christianity was the breach it made between the natural and
the supernatural. Between them there was a great gulf which could only
fitfully and temporarily be bridged by the miraculous. Students who were
being inoculated with scientific ideas of law and order, were bewildered
by a theory of life which had no organic relation to the great germinal
ideas of the day. In their desire to abolish the supernatural, the
French thinkers constructed a theory of Nature in which everything, from
the movements of solar masses to the movements of the soul, were
interpreted in terms of matter. By adopting a mechanical view of the
Universe, the French thinkers robbed Nature of much of its charm, and
stunted the emotions on the side of wonder and admiration. The world was
reduced to a vast machine, man himself being simply a temporary
embodiment of material particles in a highly complex and unique form.
Instead of being what it was to the Greeks, a temple of beauty, the
Universe to the materialist resembled a prison in which the walls
gradually closed upon the poor wretch till he was crushed under the
ruins. Goethe has left on record the impression made upon him by the
materialistic view of life. As he says, 'The materialistic theory, which
reduces all things to matter and motion, appeared to me so grey, so
Cimmerian, and so dead that we shuddered at it as at a ghost.'

_Sartor Resartus_ is studded with vigorous protests against the
mechanical view of Nature and Man. Just as distasteful to Carlyle, and
equally mechanical in spirit, was the Deistical conception of Nature as
a huge clock, under the superintendence of a Divine clock-maker,