whose
duty consisted in seeing that the clock kept good time and was in all
respects thoroughly reliable. The Germans attacked the problem from the
other side. They did not abolish the supernatural with the materialists,
or seek it in another world with the theologians; they found the
supernatural in the natural. To the materialists, Kant, Fichte,
Schelling, Hegel and Goethe had one reply:--Reduce matter to its
constituent atoms, they argued, and you never seize the principle of
life; it evades you like a spirit; in this principle everything lives
and moves and has its being. German philosophy from Kant has been
occupied in attempts to trace the spiritual principle in the great
process of cosmic evolution. In poetry, Goethe attempted to represent
this as the energising principle of life and duty. The spiritual cannot
be weighed in the scales of logic; it refuses to be put upon the
dissecting-table. As a consequence, the truth of things is best seen by
the poet. The owl-like logic-chopper, from his mechanical and
utilitarian standpoint, sees not the Divine vision. This has been called
Pantheism. Call it what we please, it is contradictory to Deism and
Materialism, and is the root thought of _Sartor Resartus_, which may be
taken as Carlyle's Confession of Faith. A few extracts will justify the
foregoing analysis. The transcendental view of Nature is expressed by
Carlyle thus:--'Atheistic science babbles poorly of it with scientific
nomenclature, experiments and what not, as if it were a poor dead thing,
to be bottled up in Leyden jars, and sold over counter; but the native
sense of man in all times, if he will himself apply his sense, proclaims
it to be a living thing--ah, an unspeakable, God-like thing, towards
which the best attitude for us, after never so much science, is awe,
devout prostration and humility of soul, worship, if not in words, then
in silence.' Here, again, is a passage quite Hegelian in its tone: 'For
Matter, were it never so despicable, is Spirit; the manifestation of
Spirit, were it never so honourable, can it be more? The thing Visible,
nay, the thing Imagined, the thing in any way conceived as Visible,
what is it but a Garment, a Clothing of the higher celestial Invisible,
unimaginable, formless, dark with excess of bright.'

The defects of Carlyle, and they are many, take their root in his
speculative view of the Universe--a view which demands careful analysis
if the student hopes to understand C