1882.J 
The Philosophy of Thomas Carlyle. 31 7 
assimilated confirmed this belief ; and he never saw clearly 
that Materialism and Idealism play into each other’s hands, 
and that while we are compelled, as a foundation for all 
subsequent reasoning,. to postulate some independent Reality, 
or “ Ding an sich ,” our total ignorance of its nature admo- 
nishes us to adopt the simplest and least imaginative 
terminology.* 
The suggestive and in many respects beautiful fragment 
entitled “ Spiritual Optics ” illustrates this defeCl of vision. 
The faCt that the Human is the parent of the Divine, that 
all supposed miracles have their being only in the mind of 
man, — as the apparent rotation of the heavens is due to 
the adual rotation of the earth, or as the onward rush of a 
landscape exists only in the brain of the traveller who dashes 
through it in an express train,- — is insisted upon with 
strenuous eloquence. But in the following sentence springs 
up, with renewed vigour, that Hydra-headed fallacy which 
cannot be destroyed even by the keenest and brightest 
metaphors. “ The delirious dancing of the universe is 
stilled, but the universe itself (what scepticism did not sus- 
peCI) is still all there. God, heaven, hell, are none of them 
annihilated for us, any more than the material woods and 
houses.” The analogy indicated here is a real one, but its 
signification may prove to be other than that contemplated by 
Carlyle. In his haughty negleCI and scorn of Physical Science 
he missed certain elementary physiological truths, which lend 
a concrete basis to abstract Idealism. In what sense can it 
be said that the “ material woods and houses ” continue to 
exist ? Around us the world is throbbing with its myriad 
pulses, varying in kind and in degree. These pulses strike 
the delicate epidermal surface of the body, and each, ac- 
cording to its kind, is taken up by a set of specially modified 
nerve structures. Here the distinctive character of the impulse 
is lost, and a uniform vibration is transmitted by distinct chan- 
nels to distinct sensory ganglia. In these ganglia, and not 
in the external eye or ear, or in the world with which eye 
and ear direCtly communicate, are manufactured the trees 
and the solid earth which we behold, the blue sky, and the 
* It may provoke a smile to find a professed Materialist like Prof. Tyndall a 
zealot in this school of Gnosticism. But Philosophy or logical consistency is 
not the forte of our genial and skilled Royal Institution Empiric. Extreme 
pains have been wasted in explaining to him the Hylo-phenomenal theorem of 
Existence, which he amusingly persists in confounding with Absolute Idealism. 
From the standpoint of vulgar Realism he ridicules, as mere moonshine, the 
sole legitimate creed of Science. — See the chapter of Lange’s History of 
Materialism in Thomas’s translation “ On the Physiology of the Sense Organs 
and the World as Representation ” (Phenomenon). 
