we can have in the victory.  Duty is to him a menace—­like the duty of a slave, were that possible.  It lacks the element which alone can make it imperative to a free being, namely, that it be recognized as his good, and that the outer law become his inner motive.  The moral law is rarely looked at by Carlyle as a beneficent revelation, and still more rarely as the condition which, if fulfilled, will reconcile man with nature and with God.  And consequently, he can draw little strength from religion; for it is only love that can cast out fear.

To sum up all in a word, Carlyle regarded evil as having penetrated into the inmost recesses of man’s being.  Thought was disease; morality was blind obedience to a foreign authority; religion was awe of an Unknowable, with whom man can claim no kinship.  Man’s nature was discovered to be spiritual, only on the side of its Wants.  It was an endowment of a hunger which nothing could satisfy—­not the infinite, because it is too great, not the finite, because it is too little; not God, because He is too far above man, not nature, because it is too far beneath him.  We are unable to satisfy ourselves with the things of sense, and are also “shut out of the heaven of spirit.”  What have been called, “the three great terms of thought”—­the World, Self, and God—­have fallen asunder in his teaching.  It is the difficulty of reconciling these which brings despair, while optimism is evidently the consciousness of their harmony.

Now, these evils which reflection has revealed, and which are so much deeper than those of mere sensuous disappointment, can only be removed by deeper reflection.  The harmony of the world of man’s experience, which has been broken by “the comprehensive curse of sceptical despair,” can, as Goethe teaches us, be restored only by thought—­

  “In thine own soul, build it up again.”

The complete refutation of Carlyle’s pessimistic view can only come, by reinterpreting each of the contradicting terms in the light of a higher conception.  We must have a deeper grasp and a new view of the Self, the World, and God.  And such a view can be given adequately only by philosophy.  Reason alone can justify the faith that has been disturbed by reflection, and re-establish its authority.

How, then, it may be asked, can a poet be expected to turn back the forces of a scepticism, which have been thus armed with the weapons of dialectic?  Can anything avail in this region except explicit demonstration?  A poet never demonstrates, but perceives; art is not a process, but a result; truth for it is immediate, and it neither admits nor demands any logical connection of ideas.  The standard-bearers and the trumpeters may be necessary to kindle the courage of the army and to lead it on to victory, but the fight must be won by the thrust of sword and pike.  Man needs more than the intuitions of the great poets, if he is to maintain solid possession of the truth.