Critical Miscellanies, Vol. I | Page 4

present case,

because Mr. Carlyle is ostentatiously illogical and defiantly
inconsistent; and, therefore, the term which might correctly describe
one side of his teaching or belief would be tolerably sure to give a
wholly false impression of some of its other sides. The qualifications
necessary to make any one of the regular epithets fairly applicable
would have to be so many, that the glosses would virtually overlay the
text. We shall be more likely to reach an instructive appreciation by
discarding such substitutes for examination, and considering, not what
pantheistic, absolutist, transcendental, or any other doctrine means, or
what it is worth, but what it is that Mr. Carlyle means about men, their
character, their relations to one another, and what that is worth.
With most men and women the master element in their opinions is
obviously neither their own reason nor their own imagination,
independently exercised, but only mere use and wont, chequered by
fortuitous sensations, and modified in the better cases by the influence
of a favourite teacher; while in the worse the teacher is the favourite
who happens to chime in most harmoniously with prepossessions, or
most effectually to nurse and exaggerate them. Among the superior
minds the balance between reason and imagination is scarcely ever held
exactly true, nor is either firmly kept within the precise bounds that are
proper to it. It is a question of temperament which of the two mental
attitudes becomes fixed and habitual, as it is a question of temperament
how violently either of them straitens and distorts the normal faculties
of vision. The man who prides himself on a hard head, which would
usually be better described as a thin head, may and constantly does fall
into a confirmed manner of judging character and circumstance, so
narrow, one-sided, and elaborately superficial, as to make common
sense shudder at the crimes that are committed in the divine name of
reason. Excess on the other side leads people into emotional transports,
in which the pre-eminent respect that is due to truth, the difficulty of
discovering the truth, the narrowness of the way that leads thereto, the
merits of intellectual precision and definiteness, and even the merits of
moral precision and definiteness, are all effectually veiled by purple or
fiery clouds of anger, sympathy, and sentimentalism, which
imagination has hung over the intelligence.

The familiar distinction between the poetic and the scientific temper is
another way of stating the same difference. The one fuses or
crystallises external objects and circumstances in the medium of human
feeling and passion; the other is concerned with the relations of objects
and circumstances among themselves, including in them all the facts of
human consciousness, and with the discovery and classification of
these relations. There is, too, a corresponding distinction between the
aspects which conduct, character, social movement, and the objects of
nature are able to present, according as we scrutinise them with a view
to exactitude of knowledge, or are stirred by some appeal which they
make to our various faculties and forms of sensibility, our tenderness,
sympathy, awe, terror, love of beauty, and all the other emotions in this
momentous catalogue. The starry heavens have one side for the
astronomer, as astronomer, and another for the poet, as poet. The
nightingale, the skylark, the cuckoo, move one sort of interest in an
ornithologist, and a very different sort in a Shelley or a Wordsworth.
The hoary and stupendous formations of the inorganic world, the
thousand tribes of insects, the great universe of plants, from those
whose size and form and hue make us afraid as if they were deadly
monsters, down to 'the meanest flower that blows,' all these are clothed
with one set of attributes by scientific intelligence, and with another by
sentiment, fancy, and imaginative association.
The contentiousness of rival schools of philosophy has obscured the
application of the same distinction to the various orders of fact more
nearly and immediately relating to man and the social union. One
school has maintained the virtually unmeaning doctrine that the will is
free, and therefore its followers never gave any quarter to the idea that
man was as proper an object of scientific scrutiny morally and
historically, as they could not deny him to be anatomically and
physiologically. Their enemies have been more concerned to dislodge
them from this position, than to fortify, organise, and cultivate their
own. The consequences have not been without their danger. Poetic
persons have rushed in where scientific persons ought not to have
feared to tread. That human character and the order of events have their
poetic aspect, and that their poetic treatment demands the rarest and
most valuable qualities of mind, is a truth which none but narrow and

superficial men of the world are rash enough to deny. But that there is