“O great, just, good God!  Miserable Me!”

This humility and contrition, this discontent verging on hopelessness, constituted, as we have seen, the characteristic attitude of Carlyle; and it represents a true and, in fact, an indispensable element of man’s moral life.

But this self-condemnation in the face of the moral law is nothing more than an element, and must not be taken either for the whole truth or for the most fundamental one.  It is because it is taken as fundamental and final that the discrepancy between morality and religion is held to be absolute, and the consciousness of evil is turned against faith in the Good.  It is an abstract way of thinking that makes us deduce, from the transcendent height of the moral ideal, the impossibility of attaining goodness, and the failure of God’s purpose in man.  And this is what Carlyle did.  He stopped short at the consciousness of imperfection, and he made no attempt to account for it.  He took it as a complete fact, and therefore drew a sharp line of distinction between the human and the divine.  And, so far, he was right; for, if we look no further than this negative side, it is emphatically absurd to identify man, be he “philosopher” or not, with the Absolute.  “Why callest thou Me good? there is none good save One, that is God.”  The “ought” must stand above all human attainment, and declare that “whatever is, is wrong.”  But whence comes the ought itself, the ideal which condemns us?  Is it not also immanent in the fact it condemns?

“Who is not acute enough,” asks Hegel, “to see a great deal in his surroundings which is really far from being what it ought to be?” And who also, we may add, has not enough of the generalizing faculty, often mistaken for a philosophical one, to extend this condemnation over the whole of “this best of all possible worlds”?  But what is this “ought-to-be,” which has such potency in it that all things confronted with it lose their worth?

The first answer is, that it is an idea which men, and particularly good men, carry with them.  But a little consideration will show that it cannot be a mere idea.  It must be something more valid than a capricious product of the individual imagination.  For we cannot wisely condemn things because they do not happen to answer to any casual conception which we may choose to elevate into a criterion.  A criterion must have objective validity.  It must be an idea of something and not an empty notion; and that something must, at the worst, be possible.  Nay, when we consider all that is involved in it, it becomes obvious that a true ideal—­an ideal which is a valid criterion—­must be not only possible but real, and, indeed, more real than that which is condemned by reference to it.  Absolute pessimism has in it the same contradiction as absolute scepticism has,—­in fact, it is only its practical counterpart; for both scepticism and pessimism involve the assumption