124 DARWINIANISM. 



judge, as I maintained he could, of Goethe's views on 

 light." 



As concerns light, the question is of quality and not of 

 quantity ; and, so far, a pure mathematician, as a pure 

 mathematician, as a non-expert, is out of court. But 

 surely Whewell was much more than a pure mathema- 

 tician. I do not know that socially Carlyle was ever 

 much more than he would have been, if, with all his 

 gifts and books, he had remained, like Jean Paul, in 

 his mother's kitchen. I do not know that, in the true 

 sense (in any sense, indeed, but in so far as he was a 

 well-educated man of good intellect), Carlyle ever became 

 a gentleman, or even exactly what we call emphatically, 

 perhaps, a man. 1 His laugh, so much talked of, was, after 

 all, as it were, a scholastic laugh, or a laugh on scholastic 

 principles (i.e. from the teeth outwards) witness Jean 

 Paul's laugh in Sartor Resartus at the proposal of a cast- 

 iron king rather than the jolly, hearty guffaw of a 

 man who laughs simply as tickled to the marrow by 

 humour. But Carlyle, besides being a great genius, a 

 literary genius, that is, of the purest water, was a man 

 that thought and felt intensely as to all that, theoretically, 

 concerned truth and, morally, right ; and so, consequently, 

 he was unhappy in his time. Mere physical, material 

 theory came to be dominant in it. It was wonderful, and 

 to him hateful, how (to him) his shallow contemporary, 

 Mill, whom he despised, foisted his abstract copy-lines on 



1 " Just as we never think that we know a man in his self, if we 

 only know his Geist (for that, as always the higher, is always in a 

 measure something so much the more impersonal, something inde- 

 pendent of him, independent of his will), or just as we believe our- 

 selves to know a man's self only when we know his heart : so is God 

 truly personal to us only in revelation " (Schelling, xiv. 26). 



The Geist may be one thing, but the clay is always another : and, 

 after all, it was to expiscation of the clay that Carlyle himself was 

 about the first to prompt us. 



