or recalcitrant Neologist, Mystic, Idealist, Deist or Pantheist,
practical Absolutist, or "the strayed reveller" of Radicalism--he is
consistent in his even bigoted antagonism to all Utilitarian solutions of
the problems of the world. One of the foremost physicists of our time was
among his truest and most loyal friends; they were bound together by the
link of genius and kindred political views; and Carlyle was himself an
expert in mathematics, the mental science that most obviously subserves
physical research: but of Physics themselves (astronomy being scarcely a
physical science) his ignorance was profound, and his abusive criticisms
of such men as Darwin are infantile. This intellectual defect, or
rather vacuum, left him free to denounce material views of life with
unconditioned vehemence. "Will the whole upholsterers," he exclaims in
his half comic, sometimes nonsensical, vein, "and confectioners of modern
Europe undertake to make one single shoeblack happy!" And more seriously
of the railways, without whose noisy aid he had never been able to visit
the battle-fields of Friedrich II.--

Our stupendous railway miracles I have stopped short in admiring....
The distances of London to Aberdeen, to Ostend, to Vienna, are still
infinitely inadequate to me. Will you teach me the winged flight through
immensity, up to the throne dark with excess of bright? You unfortunate,
you grin as an ape would at such a question: you do not know that unless
you can reach thither in some effectual most veritable sense, you are
lost, doomed to Hela's death-realm and the abyss where mere brutes are
buried. I do not want cheaper cotton, swifter railways; I want what
Novalis calls "God, Freedom, and Immortality." Will swift railways and
sacrifices to Hudson help me towards that?

The ECONOMIC AND MECHANICAL SPIRIT of the age, faith in mere steel or
stone, was one of Carlyle's red rags. The others were INSINCERITY in