MASSOJV'S INTERPRETATION OF CARLYLE. 235 



ing care to pack up what was really their own and bring that along 

 with them." 



The scientific deficiency of Carlyle's mind was nowhere displayed 

 more strikingly than in his scornful rejection of what science has 

 accomplished in the very fields which he himself cultivated — i. e., the 

 phenomena of human and social afllairs. Political economy, as is well 

 known, was his abomination. He is forever talking of " facts," but 

 forever deriding those who studied them methodically. On this point, 

 Professor Masson observes : 



" What was even worse, Carlyle not only refused the trouble of con- 

 siderations of the merely mechanical kind himself, but regarded too 

 generally with contempt the labors and speculations of others in that 

 region. His impatience of reasoned political science in any form, and 

 especially in the form of that modern political economy which he de- 

 rided as ' the dismal science,' really shut him out, more than he was 

 himself aware, from that intimacy with the * fact of things ' which he 

 defined so energetically as the all-essential necessity for men of all 

 sorts and the sole attainable wisdom. It is by science only, by rea- 

 soned investigation only, that we can know, in any department, what 

 is the real 'fact of things' ; and till we know, from the teachings of 

 strict political science, whether in its present form of so-called politi- 

 cal economy, or in some larger and better form, all that we can know 

 of the real ' fact of things ' in that department, our practical efforts 

 in politics and philanthropy will continue to be, as they have too much 

 been heretofore, mere knocking of our heads against stone walls, mere 

 pourings of water into sieves. Not less in all matters and contempla- 

 tions, physical and cosmological, must we receive our instructions as to 

 the real ' fact of things ' from the sciences thereto appertaining. If 

 science tells us surely and conclusively that such and such was and has 

 been the course of actual physical nature, then we are bound, whether 

 we like it or not, to imagine the past physical course of things pre- 

 cisely in that manner ; and, if we persist in imagining it one whit 

 otherwise, we incur the guilt of opposing the light, and are untrue to 

 the 'fact of things.' Carlyle, as we have seen, acknowledged this ; 

 but it was but a passing acknowledgment. He was too old, his invet- 

 eracy in the constitutional faiths of his own spirit was too confirmed, 

 to permit him to adjust these faiths to the new cosmological concep- 

 tions which science was making imperative in his later days, or even 

 to perceive that it was of any great consequence that this should be 

 done." 



