MASSOJV'S INTERPRETATION OF CARLYLE. 231 



external realities — sun, moon, stars, rocks, clouds, earth, and human 

 history and tradition — is resolved or reduced into mere present think- 

 ings of your mind or my mind, a mere complex phantasmagory of the 

 present human spirit ; and therefore it is through this present human 

 spirit that one has to seek the all-explaining bond of connection be- 

 tween the real world of finite nature and the real and infinite super- 

 natural world. Now, though Carlyle was acquainted with this ideal- 

 istic theory, had evident likings for it, and now and then favored it 

 with a passing glance of exposition, I can not find that he had ever 

 worked out the theory in all its bearings — an enormously difficult busi- 

 ness — or adopted it intimately for his own behoof. He remained to 

 the end what may be called a Realistic Transcendentalist or Tran- 

 scendental Mealist. By this is meant that he was satisfied to think of 

 the world of space and time, and of all physical and historical reali- 

 ties, as having substantially existed, in its essential fabric at least, very 

 much as we imagine it by an independent tenure from the Infinite, 

 distinct from that of all past or present conceiving minds inserted into 

 it and in traffic with it. 



"Here, however, we may note an interesting peculiarity of his 

 special form of Realistic Transcendentalism, which latterly gave him 

 some trouble. Though he talks of ' rude nations,' ' rude times,' etc., 

 and recognized perhaps a certain progress in human conditions and 

 even in the human organism, he seems essentially to have always 

 thought of humanity as a self-contained entity, fully fashioned within 

 itself from the first, and cut off from all its material surroundings and 

 from any priority of material beginnings. Hence his oppugnancy in 

 his latter days to the modern scientific doctrine of evolution as brought 

 into vogue more especially by the reasonings of Darwin. For a trans- 

 cendentalist of the idealistic sort the doctrine of evolution can have 

 no terrors. If the world of space, time, and history is but a fabrica- 

 tion of our present thinkings, a phantasmagory of the present human 

 spirit, what does it matter how much our present thinkings may change, 

 or how many seons of so-called time and imagined processes and marches 

 of events we may find it necessary to throw into our phantasmagory ? 

 For the transcendental realist the difficulty is greater. Though he has 

 the ultimate relief of believing that the entire procession or evolution 

 of things physical as modern science would represent it— from the 

 Universal Nebula on to the dispersed starry immensity, and so to the 

 solar system, our earth as a planet in that system, and the history of 

 that separate earth through the ages of its existence since it became 

 separate — is but one vast forth-putting or manifestation of the incon- 

 ceivable Absolute, he docs not like to think of himself, the paragon of 

 animals, or of the human mind and soul, as in any way really derived 

 from this antecedent physical evolution, and more especially from 

 those nearer portions of it which concern our separate earth and lead 

 from protoplasmic slime, through differentiated bestialism, to a spe- 



