But the real point about the limitation of logic and the partial overthrow of logic by writers like Carlyle is deeper and somewhat different.  The fault of the great mass of logicians is not that they bring out a false result, or, in other words, are not logicians at all.  Their fault is that by an inevitable psychological habit they tend to forget that there are two parts of a logical process—­the first the choosing of an assumption, and the second the arguing upon it; and humanity, if it devotes itself too persistently to the study of sound reasoning, has a certain tendency to lose the faculty of sound assumption.  It is astonishing how constantly one may hear from rational and even rationalistic persons such a phrase as ’He did not prove the very thing with which he started,’ or ’The whole of his case rested upon a pure assumption,’ two peculiarities which may be found by the curious in the works of Euclid.  It is astonishing, again, how constantly one hears rationalists arguing upon some deep topic, apparently without troubling about the deep assumptions involved, having lost their sense, as it were, of the real colour and character of a man’s assumption.  For instance, two men will argue about whether patriotism is a good thing and never discover until the end, if at all, that the cosmopolitan is basing his whole case upon the idea that man should, if he can, become as God, with equal sympathies and no prejudices, while the nationalist denies any such duty at the very start, and regards man as an animal who has preferences, as a bird has feathers.

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Thus it was with Carlyle:  he startled men by attacking not arguments but assumptions.  He simply brushed aside all the matters which the men of the nineteenth century held to be incontrovertible, and appealed directly to the very different class of matters which they knew to be true.  He induced men to study less the truth of their reasoning, and more the truth of the assumptions upon which they reasoned.  Even where his view was not the highest truth, it was always a refreshing and beneficent heresy.  He denied every one of the postulates upon which the age of reason based itself.  He denied the theory of progress which assumed that we must be better off than the people of the twelfth century.  Whether we were better than the people of the twelfth century according to him depended entirely upon whether we chose or deserved to be.

He denied every type and species of prop or association or support which threw the responsibility upon civilisation or society, or anything but the individual conscience.  He has often been called a prophet.  The real ground of the truth of this phrase is often neglected.  Since the last era of purely religious literature, the era of English Puritanism, there has been no writer in whose eyes the soul stood so much alone.