Coleridge, following Kant, gave the somewhat misleading name of “reason” (as opposed to “understanding”) to the intuitive power by which man apprehends God directly, and, in his view, imagination is the faculty, which in the light of this intuitive reason interprets and unifies the symbols of the natural world.  Hence its value, for it alone gives man the key

    Of that eternal language, which thy God
    Utters, who from eternity doth teach
    Himself in all, and all things in himself.[49]

Carlyle’s mysticism is the essence of his being, it flames through his amazing medley of writings, it guides his studies and his choice of subjects, it unifies and explains his visions, his thought, and his doctrines.  His is a mystical attitude and belief of a perfectly simple and broad kind, including no abstruse subtleties of metaphysical speculation, as with Coleridge, but based on one or two deeply rooted convictions.  This position seems to have been reached by him partly through intellectual conflict which found relief and satisfaction in the view of life taken by Goethe, Fichte, and other German “transcendental” thinkers; but partly also through a definite psychical experience which befell him in Edinburgh when he was twenty-six, and which from that day changed for him the whole of his outlook on life.  He speaks of it himself as “a Spiritual New-birth, or Baphometic Fire-baptism.”  It came to him after a period of great wretchedness, of torture with doubt and despair, and—­what is significant—­“during three weeks of total sleeplessness.”  These are conditions which would be likely to reduce his body to the state of weakness and sensitiveness which seems often antecedent to psychic experience.  He has given an account of the incident in Sartor (Book ii. chap, vii.), when, he says, “there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul; and I shook base Fear away from me for ever.  I was strong, of unknown strength; a spirit, almost a god.”  The revelation seems to have been of the nature of a certainty and assertion of his own inherent divinity, his “native God-created majesty,” freedom and potential greatness.  This brought with it a characteristic defiance of untoward outer circumstances which gave him strength and resolution.  “Perhaps,” he says, “I directly thereupon began to be a man.”

Carlyle believes that the world and everything in it is the expression of one great indivisible Force; that nothing is separate, nothing is dead or lost, but that all “is borne forward on the bottomless shoreless flood of Action, and lives through perpetual metamorphoses.”  Everything in the world is an embodiment of this great Force, this “Divine Idea,” hence everything is important and charged with meaning.  “Rightly viewed no meanest object is insignificant; all objects are as windows, through which the philosophic eye looks into Infinitude itself."[50]