'The builder of the Universe was wise,He planned all souls,all systems,planets,particles;The plan He shaped all worlds and aeons by,Was --Heavens!--was thy small nine-and-thirty Articles.'(190)An earlier version of these lines speaks of the 'logic of Maurice,'who had characteristically proved that the articles were a charter of religious liberty.(191)Carlyle rejected formulas.The Maurician rehabilitation led to mere cant.Like Maurice,he was in principle a mystic,and holds that mysticism may be taken in a true sense,(192)in which it seems to be much the same with an Idealist as contrasted with a materialist doctrine.When he first made Mill's acquaintance,it was under the erroneous impression that Mill too was a mystic.(193)I have spoken of Carlyle's personal relations to Mill.His judgment of the Utilitarians generally is significant.Froude publishes some entries from Carlyle's journal of 1829-30,a time when the prophet was only preluding his fuller utterances.(194)The Utilitarians,he holds,exhibit tendencies spread over the whole intellect and morals of the time.Utilitarianism must collapse,because the reason will triumph over the senses,and the angel at last prevail over the brute.The moral nature of man is deeper than the intellectual;the significance of Christ,he says,is altogether moral,and the significance of Bentham 'altogether intellectual,logical.'Where logic is the only method,the resulting system can be only mechanical.'Alas!poor England!Stupid,purblind,pudding-eating England,'Bentham with his Mills(195)grinding 'thee out morality --and some Macaulay,also be-aproned and a grinder,testing and decrying it.'The mention of Macaulay reminds him that the Utilitarians have a relative merit.'They have logical machinery,'and do grind 'fiercely and potently on their own foundation,whereas the Whigs have no foundation.The Whigs are amateurs,the radicals are guild-brethren.'(196)The public utterances are versions of the same doctrines.In Sartor Resartus Teufelsdrkh would consent that the 'monster Utilitaria'should trample down palaces and temples 'with her broad hoof,'that new and better might be built.(197)So in the Hero-Worship(198)he calls 'this gross steam-engine Utilitarianism'an approach towards a new faith.It is at least a 'laying down of cant,'an honest acceptance of the belief in mechanism:'Benthamism is an eyeless heroism;the human species,like a hapless blinded Samson,grinding in the Philistine mill,clasps convulsively the pillars of its mill,brings huge ruin down,but ultimately deliverance withal.Of Bentham I meant to say no harm.'In later years Carlyle insists more emphatically upon the bad side of Utilitarianism.He had grown more bitter,and was more alienated personally.In the Chartism (1839)he attacks the 'Paralytic Radicalism'--paralytic being substituted for 'philosophical'which has sounded statistically a 'sea of troubles'around us,and concluded that nothing is to be done but to look on.Paralytic Radicalism,accordingly,is 'one of the most afflictive phenomena the mind of man can be called upon to contemplate!'(199)The summary of his later view is given in the famous summary of the 'Pig Philosophy'in the Latter-day Pamphlets.The universe is regarded as an 'immeasurable swine's trough,'and the consequences deduced in a kind of Swiftian catechism.(200)Utilitarianism means mere sensualism.Carlyle's interpretation,true or false,reduces the issue to the simplest terms.Will you accept the mechanical or the mystical view?Carlyle's metaphysical leanings were to some forms of transcendental idealism.Time and space,as he says in the Sartor Resartus,are the canvas on which our life-visions are painted.They are mysterious 'world-embracing phantoms,'to be rent asunder by the seer who would pierce to the Holy of Holies.
They are illusions,though while we are on earth we try in vain to strip them off.Men are spirits;the earth but a vision.We issue from and fall back into mystery.'We are such stuff,'in his favourite quotation,'
As dreams are made of,and our little Life Is rounded with a sleep.'(201)This is poetry rather than philosophy;and though the thought is always present to Carlyle and constitutes one secret of his most powerful passages,it would be impossible to grasp it as a logical theory or imprison it in any formula whatever.All systems and formulas are suspicious to him.He is a 'seer'who not only does not require any logical apparatus,but holds that to require one is to give up the point.It is the sense of the ephemeral nature of man,of his suspension in the midst of infinities,which stimulates or overpowers him.That sentiment lies deeper than all reasoning.The 'mechanical'view has the advantage derived from the authority of the physical sciences;but the sciences,he holds,lie in a superficial region;they belong to the world of appearance,not to the world of reality.
When the mystic ventures into the ordinary daylight and fights the man of science with his own weapons,he will get the worst of it.Science must have its rights on its own ground;and to suppose the supernatural intruding here and there into natural phenomena is to court defeat.There are no 'miracles,'but the universe is itself miraculous.His great message,given in Sartor Resartus,is that the natural is the supernatural.(202)We are not to pick up 'intuitions'here and there;but we have one intuition,that the world is not a mechanism but a revelation of God.No set of words can hold the great mystery.They are hopelessly inadequate,and the sooner they are swept into oblivion the better.But the one profound mystery remains.
