dness and Happiness. As Spencer puts
it: 'Obviously the implication is that Blessedness is not a kind of
Happiness, and this implication at once suggests the question, What mode
of feeling is this? If it is a state of consciousness at all, it is
necessarily one of three states--painful, indifferent, or
pleasurable.... If the pleasurable states are in excess, then the
blessed life can be distinguished from any other pleasurable life only
by the relative amount or the quality of its pleasures. It is a life
which makes happiness of a certain kind and degree its end, and the
assumption that blessedness is not a form of happiness lapses.... In
brief, blessedness has for its necessary condition of existence
increased happiness, positive or negative in some consciousness or
other; and disappears utterly if we assume that the actions called
blessed are known to cause decrease of happiness in others as well as in
the actor.'

To German philosophy and literature Carlyle owed his critical method, by
which he all but revolutionised criticism as understood by his Edinburgh
and London contemporaries. Carlyle began his apprenticeship with the
Edinburgh Reviewers, in whose hand criticism never lost its political
bias. Apart from that, criticism up till the time of Carlyle was mainly
statical. The critic was a kind of literary book-keeper who went upon
the double-entry system. On one page were noted excellences, on the
other defects, and when the two columns were _totalled_ the debtor and
creditor side of the transaction was set forth. Where, as in the cases
of Burns and Byron, genius was complicated with moral aberration,
anything like a correct estimate was impossible. The result was that in
Scotland criticism oscillated between the ethical severity of the pulpit
and the daring laxity of free thought. As the Edinburgh Reviewers could
not afford to set the clergy at defiance, they had to pay due respect to
conventional tastes and standards. Carlyle faced the question from a
different standpoint. He introduced into criticism the dynamic principle
which he found in the Germans, particularly in Goethe. In contemplating
a work of Art, the Germans talk much of the importance of seizing upon
the creative spirit, what Hegel called the Idea. The thought of Goethe
and Hegel, though differently expressed, resolves itself into the
conception of a life principle which shapes materials into harmony with
innate forms. In the sphere of life the deter