Carlyle's 'conversion'took place in Leith Walk in June 1821.(185)It followed three years of spiritual misery;and it is recorded in the famous chapter in Sartor Resartus on the 'Everlasting No.'(186)That passage is,indeed,the keynote to Carlyle's history.Briefly,he had found himself face to face with materialism and atheism.The weapons of defence afforded by such teachers as Brown were futile.Carlyle felt that he too was drifting towards the abysses whither they were being dragged by Hume.The word duty,so sceptics would persuade him,had no meaning,or was the name for a mere calculation of pleasure;an exhortation to build not on morality but on cookery.The universe seemed to be 'void of Life,of Purpose,of Volition,even of Hostility:it was one dead,unmeasurable steam-engine,rolling on in its dead indifference,to grind me limb from limb.O the vast solitary Golgotha and Mill of Death!'The nightmare was broken by an act of will.The 'Everlasting No'pealed 'authoritatively through all recesses of my Being,of my Me;and then it was that my whole Me stood up in native God-created majesty and with emphasis recorded its protest.'The result is noteworthy.'Even from that time the temper of my misery was changed:not Fear or whining sorrow at it,but Indignation and grim fire-eyed Defiance.'Carlyle had won not peace but a 'change of misery.'He could look at the enemy with 'fire-eyed defiance'but not with the calm of settled victory.His emancipation was not won by a reasoned answer to doubt.In the earlier essays Carlyle shows apparent sympathy with German philosophy.(187)He speaks with profound admiration,though in general and popular language,of the doctrines of Kant,Novalis,and Fichte,and seems to accept Coleridge's theory of a Reason superior to the Understanding.(188)Carlyle,however,was still less of a metaphysician proper than of a poet.He is a man of intuitions,scorning all logical apparatus in itself,and soon afterwards appears to regard metaphysics in general as a hopeless process of juggling which tries to educe conviction out of negation and necessarily ends in scepticism.(189)To him Goethe rather than any metaphysician presented the true solution.No two men of genius,indeed,could be more unlike.The rugged,stormy Puritan could hardly,one would have thought,breathe the serene atmosphere of the prophet of culture.But the very contrast fascinated him.Goethe had cast aside all the effete dogmas,and had yet reached the victorious position in which symmetrical development was possible.Carlyle remained to the end desperately struggling,full of 'fire-eyed defiance,'but never getting outside the chaotic elements.The metaphysical systems of Kant's successors attracted him as protests against materialism,but he preferred a shorter cut to the end,and his Scottish common sense was always whispering that philosophy was apt to be mere 'transcendental moonshine.'
Carlyle therefore was essentially protesting against the mechanical doctrines embodied in Utilitarianism.But he saw the hopelessness of meeting the attack in the old-fashioned armour of theology.The dogmas of the churches were dead,beyond all hopes of resuscitation.The verse in Past and Present gives his view:
