Even such a vague indication of Carlyle's general meaning is an attempt to define an imaginative tendency which shrinks from definite formulation.The more practical application is perhaps more definable.The 'Everlasting No'means:I will not believe that the world is a mere dead mechanism,nor that the sole forces by which society is moulded are the sensual appetites.Rightly or wrongly,Carlyle attributed those views to the Utilitarians.They had a certain negative merit,in so far as they took their own line directly and consistently.The ordinary theology was a mass of 'shams'and 'cants'--a collection of subterfuges by which men could blind themselves for the time to the necessary drift of the current.The way to meet the Utilitarian was not to compromise or to argue,but to leave the world of outward fact and to plant yourself on a deeper base:the direct,imperative,and unassailable conviction or intuition of the divine order implied everywhere beneath the 'living raiment.'The issue then becomes simple and absolute.No set of creeds and 'formulas'can matter;'evidences'are an absurdity;the one formula is the divinity of the universe;the only evidence,the direct intuition of the eternal verities.The religions of the world are good so far as they recognise this truth;bad so far as they try to imprison it in any sort of formula or make it dependent upon any particular fact.To Maurice,as to others,this attitude seemed to be hopeless.Does it not become mere pantheism a sentiment too vague to be efficient?
Pantheism is a phrase scarcely appropriate for Carlyle's creed.If Carlyle believed in God,he also believed for practical purposes in the devil.He might have been expected to accept some such pessimistic scheme as Schopenhauer's.He was deterred by his innate Puritanism.The voice of God for him,however vaguely defined,is heard in morality.God is essentially the giver of the supreme laws of human conduct,however much the legislator may be wrapped in mystery.The 'simple creed,'according to his chief disciple,which was the 'central principle'of all Carlyle's thought,was the creed of the Jews and the Puritans,namely,that obedience to the divine law is the one condition of human welfare,and that nations who worship Baal even in the guise of art or of material prosperity are on the road to destruction.(203)Carlyle,then,is so far like Coleridge and Maurice,that he feels that a religion must find some deeper and more universal base than can be discovered in the region of empirical fact.It must correspond to an imperative dictate of the whole heart or the intellect.He carries out the principle with incomparably more vigour by rejecting all historical supports and particular formulas.Neither the Thirty-nine Articles nor the decrees of councils or popes can be adequate to express the mystery;nor can the religious sentiment be dependent upon particular events and 'miracles.'It is the difficulty of all such methods that the appeal to the heart comes to be the appeal to the prejudices of the individual prophet.In a man of such marked idiosyncrasies as Carlyle's this is of course conspicuous.His version of history and of philosophy reflects his inherited prepossessions.It is enough here to mark one or two of the main points upon which he came into conflict with contemporaries.A characteristic result is his theory of hero-worship.The divine element in the world cannot be enshrined in one sacred book or a single supernatural order.The revelation comes not only through Moses or Christ,but through every great man.Odin,Mahomet,Dante,Shakespeare,Luther,John Knox,Johnson,Rousseau,Burns,Cromwell,and Napoleon are his chief instances in the 'lectures';each,more or less perfectly,was the vehicle of a more or less partial revelation.But then,may we not see gleams of the same light in all the multitudinous strugglings of the poor human beings who have more or less consciously co-operated in the world's progress?Here and there his shrewd common sense leads him to recognise the value even of the stupid and the formula-ridden.(204)But,as a rule,he thinks of the world as a collection of 'dull millions'who 'as a dumb flock roll hither and thither,'led by little more than 'animal instincts.'Among them at rare intervals are scattered men of intellect and will.(205)The great men,as he says elsewhere,are 'children of the idea'--such a one as Ram Dass,who set up for a god because he had 'fire enough in his belly to burn up all the sins in the world.'(206)Inspiration belongs to the inspired few,who have to struggle amid the vast chaotic masses incapable of originating thought or action.To Carlyle,the essence of history was biography;the personal influence of a small minority of great men.The view condemns scientific modes of history.To disbelieve in the importance of great men is supposed to show materialistic principles.A 'law'of human development denies the importance of individual peculiarities.To hold that Cromwell or a Napoleon was a relatively insignificant accident,the mere fly on the wheel of great evolutionary processes,seems to be to lead to the exclusion of all action of the will or of thought.To Carlyle accordingly the historical method in some of its tendencies was profoundly antipathetic.To diminish the power of the individual was,in his view,to deny the spiritual forces upon which society is dependent.Inspiration,therefore,though no longer confined to a particular church,is still confined to the elect who stand out as burning and shining lights in the dim twilight of his Rembrandtesque pictures.
