230 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



eration, and on account of which his contemporaries styled him latterly 

 the Chelsea Prophet. 



" The first name affixed to Carlyle to signify a perception of the 

 difference of his ways of thinking from those of other people was 

 Mystic. This was the name given to him long ago in that Edinburgh 

 circle round Jeffrey which he first stirred by his personal peculiarities 

 when he was a resident in Comely Bank, and by his articles on Ger- 

 man subjects. He seemed to be the apostle of an unknown something 

 called ' German Mysticism,' and to be trying to found a school of 

 'English Mystics.' lie dallied with the term himself for a while, 

 and even took it with him to London. Intrinsically, however, there 

 could have been no more absurd designation. By the whole cast of 

 his intellect Carlyle was even the reverse of a mystic, constrained as 

 he was always to dcfiniteness of intellectual conception and to optical 

 clearness of representation ; and, though he had a kindly eye toward 

 the Mystics, he could make nothing of them except by unmysticizing 

 them — his essay on Novalis, for example, being an unsatisfactory at- 

 tempt to extract gleams out of the opaque. It was the novelty of 

 Carlyle's principles to those among whom they were first propounded, 

 the strangeness of the objects he tried to bring within their ken, that 

 occasioned the resort to such a misfitting epithet. A far fitter desig- 

 nation would have been Transcendentalist. Pardon me if I detain 

 you a little with this word from the scholastic nomenclature and its 

 applicability to Carlyle. It is easy enough to understand, and we 

 have really no other name so suitable for the thing. 



" A Transcendentalist in philosophy is the very opposite of what we 

 call a Secularist. lie is the opponent of that system of philosophy 

 which " apprehends no further than this world and squares one's life 

 according," that system of philosophy which regards the visible uni- 

 verse of time, space, and human experience as the sum total of all 

 reality, and existing humanity in the midst of this universe as the 

 topmost thing now in being. Beyond, and around, and even in this 

 visible universe, the Transcendentalist holds — this world of sun, moon, 

 and stars, and of the earth and human history in the midst — there is 

 a supernatural world, a world of eternal and infinite mystery, invisi- 

 ble and inconceivable, yet most real, and so interconnected with the 

 ongoings of the visible universe that constant reference to it is the 

 supreme necessity of the human spirit, the highest duty of man, and 

 the indispensable condition of all that is best in the human genius. 

 In this sense Carlyle was a transcendentalist from the very first. He 

 believed in a world of eternal and infinite realities transcending our 

 finite world of time, space, sense, experience, and conceivability. 



" In the scholastic nomenclature, however, there may be recog- 

 nized two distinct varieties of Transcendentalism. There is, first, 

 what may be called Idealistic Transcendentalism or Transcendental 

 Idealism. By this idealistic theory all the apparent universe of known 



