14 THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA 



uniformities whatever by which the organized desires of men are 

 governed. He dwells upon the incurable blindness of mistaking 

 utilitarianism for mere selfishness, and of ignoring the fact that it 

 takes into account both the pursuit of others' welfare and the exercise 

 of the highest sentiments. He asks with what reason a man could 

 keep on insisting upon the "Laws of this Universe" and our obligation 

 to respect them, yet direct his ceaseless scorn upon those patient 

 thinkers who devoted their lives to finding out what these laws are. 

 And Spencer sums up his estimate by saying of Carlyle that "he had 

 a daily secretion of curses, which he had to vent upon somebody or 

 something." 



Criticisms of the sort I have indicated were very general among 

 those who wrote of Carlyle a generation ago, and they are now being 

 reproduced in great abundance. I am not here concerned to argue 

 against them, for although I feel that some of them are much over- 

 done, they seem to contain a very important element of truth. But 

 the earlier critics, unlike most of those who are now seeking to correct 

 our estimate, were at the same time enthusiastic in dwelling upon the 

 great undying glories of Carlyle's work, in comparison with which 

 these were no more than spots upon the sun. They used to remind us 

 how he was the first to make the work of Goethe really appreciated by 

 Englishmen, and to inspire a genuine interest in the whole Romantic 

 movement of German literature. They remembered with gratitude 

 how he was a pioneer in making continental thought known to his 

 countrymen a century ago, in making their taste less insular, more 

 receptive to the currents of speculation abroad, more hospitably 

 sensitive to the mental habits and attitudes among those who spoke a 

 language different from their own. They noted how to him, more 

 than to anyone else, it was due that such names as Richter, and Tieck, 

 and Novalis, passed from being mere names to Englishmen, and 

 became an introduction to very fertile fields of European thought. 

 They did not think it to his discredit that such efforts were directed 

 in the main, though by no means exclusively, to the exposition of 

 German writers, for the Germany of which he then spoke was the 

 Romantic Germany of a hundred years ago, not the militaristic nation 

 of our own time, and we may perhaps add now that we have learned 

 in a trying school how the temperament of foreign countries at any 

 period cannot with advantage be left unexplored. The older critics, 

 too, could not forget how Carlyle was the first, and perhaps long 

 remained the greatest exponent of the genius of Burns. Some of them 

 at least realised that, although he was no technical philosopher, we owe 

 it to him that the significance of the Kantian school was first pressed 

 upon the notice of British thinkers, that innumerable weaknesses in 



