Such soul-sight and root-centre for the
mind--mere optimism explains only the surface or fringe of it--Carlyle
was mostly, perhaps entirely without. He seems instead to have been
haunted in the play of his mental action by a spectre, never entirely
laid from first to last, (Greek scholars, I believe, find the
same mocking and fantastic apparition attending Aristophanes, his
comedies,)--the spectre of world-destruction.
How largest triumph or failure in human life, in war or peace, may
depend on some little hidden centrality, hardly more than a drop of
blood, a pulse-beat, or a breath of air! It is certain that all these
weighty matters, democracy in America, Carlyleism, and the temperament
for deepest political or literary exploration, turn on a simple point
in speculative philosophy.
The most profound theme that can occupy the mind of man--the problem
on whose solution science, art, the bases and pursuits of nations, and
everything else, including intelligent human happiness, (here to-day,
1882, New York, Texas, California, the same as all times, all lands,)
subtly and finally resting, depends for competent outset and argument,
is doubtless involved in the query: What is the fusing explanation and
tie--what the relation between the (radical, democratic) Me, the human
identity of understanding, emotions, spirit, &c., on the one side,
of and with the (conservative) Not Me, the whole of the material
objective universe and laws, with what is behind them in time and
space, on the other side? Immanuel Kant, though he explain'd
or partially explain'd, as may be said, the laws of the human
understanding, left this question an open one.
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