386 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 



' Social Organism,' but Carlyle saw early and utilised 

 nobly the beauty and the truth of the metaphor. 



In the month of May, 1840, the foregoing words 

 were spoken. Harking back to 1831, we find him at 

 Craigenputtock, drawing this picture : ' As I rode 

 through the Schwarzwald I said to myself: That little 

 fire which glows star-like across the dark-growing moor, 

 where the sooty smith bends over his anvil, and thou 

 hopest to replace thy lost horseshoe is it a detached, 

 separated speck, cut off from the whole universe ; or is 

 it indissolubly joined to the whole ? Thou fool, that 

 smithy-fire was primarily kindled at the sun.' (Joule 

 and Mayer were scientifically unborn when these words 

 were written.) He continues : ' Detached, separated ! 

 I say there is no such separation ; nothing hitherto was 

 ever stranded, cast aside ; but all, were it only a withered 

 leaf, works together with all, and lives through perpetual 

 metamorphoses.' With its parts in * aeterne alterna- 

 tion ' the universe presented itself to the mind of Car- 

 lyle. ' The drop which thou shakest from thy wet hand 

 rests not where it falls, but to-morrow thou findest it 

 swept away ; already on the wings of the north-wind 

 it is nearing the Tropic of Cancer. How came it to 

 evaporate and not lie motionless? Thinkest thou 

 there is ought motionless; without force and utterly 

 dead ? ' l Such passages and they abound in his 

 writings might justify us in giving Carlyle the credit 

 of poetically, but accurately, foreshadowing the doctrine 

 of the Conservation of Energy. As a physiologist 

 describes the relation of nerve to muscle, he hits off 

 the function, and the fate, of demagogues in revolu- 

 tionary times : ' Eecord of their thought remains not ; 

 death and darkness have swept it out utterly. Nay, 



1 Sartor Resartus, Library Edition, pp. 68, 69. 



