fraction of life can be increased in value not so much by increasing your numerator as by lessening your denominator.”  Blessed alone is he that expecteth nothing.  The holy of holies, where man hears whispered the mystery of life, is “the sanctuary of sorrow.”  “What Act of Legislature was there that thou shouldst be Happy?  A little while ago thou hadst no right to be at all.  What if thou wert born and predestined not to be Happy, but to be Unhappy?  Nay, is not ’life itself a disease, knowledge the symptom of derangement’?  Have not the poets sung ’Hymns to the Night’ as if Night were nobler than Day; as if Day were but a small motley-coloured veil spread transiently over the infinite bosom of Night, and did but deform and hide from us its pure transparent eternal deeps.”  “We, the whole species of Mankind, and our whole existence and history, are but a floating speck in the illimitable ocean of the All ... borne this way and that way by its deep-swelling tides, and grand ocean currents, of which what faintest chance is there that we should ever exhaust the significance, ascertain the goings and comings?  A region of Doubt, therefore, hovers for ever in the back-ground....  Only on a canvas of Darkness, such is man’s way of being, could the many-coloured picture of our Life paint itself and shine.”

In such passages as these, there is far deeper pessimism than in anything which Byron could experience or express.  Scepticism is directed by Carlyle, not against the natural elements of life—­the mere sensuous outworks, but against the citadel of thought itself.  Self-consciousness, or the reflecting interpretation by man of himself and his world, the very activity that lifts him above animal existence and makes him man, instead of being a divine endowment, is declared to be a disease, a poisonous subjectivity destructive of all good.  The discovery that man is spirit and no vulture, which was due to Carlyle himself more than to any other English writer of his age, seemed, after all, to be a great calamity; for it led to the renunciation of happiness, and filled man with yearnings after a better than happiness, but left him nothing wherewith they might be satisfied, except “the duty next to hand.”  And the duty next to hand, as interpreted by Carlyle, is a means of suppressing by action, not idle speech only, but thought itself.  But, if this be true, the highest in man is set against itself.  And what kind of action remains possible to a “speck on the illimitable ocean, borne this way and that way by its deep-swelling tides”?  “Here on earth we are soldiers, fighting in a foreign land; that understand not the plan of the campaign, and have no need to understand it, seeing what is at our hand to be done.”  But there is one element of still deeper gloom in this blind fighting; it is fought for a foreign cause.  It is God’s cause and not ours, or ours only in so far as it has been despotically imposed upon us; and it is hard to discover from Carlyle what interest