386 PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS OF 



Other penetrative minds have made us familiar with the 

 " 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 "seterne 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 aught motionless; without force and utterly 

 dead ? " * 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, 

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



