Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/194

 and the deep religious feeling which lies behind it, must have been as the music of the spheres to such a man as Carlyle: a light from heaven to the Puritan who, from first to last, was the ruling spirit within him. And he can hardly have failed to see that he had here the reasoned justification of a faith which, without such justification, would have been little better than a blind instinct.

In turning from Kant to Fichte we pass at once from surmise to certainty. If there is one thing clear in the mental history of Carlyle, it is the vastness of his debt to Fichte. Whether in the speculative ideas which lay at the base of his whole outlook upon life, or in the political theories which, as time went on, came to bulk more and more largely in his published writings—whether in Sartor Resartus or in Heroes and Hero-worship, whether in the Miscellanies or in Frederick—he was always, freely indeed but none the less certainly, building upon Fichte.

Here, however, a distinction must be made. Carlyle was no trained philosopher. And it is not from the technical writings of Fichte's earlier days, but from the popular expositions of his later years, that he drew the materials of his speculative creed. It is not to the Wissenschaftslehre, but to Das Wesen des Gelehrten and other similar writings, that in the main he is indebted. In the case of his political theories—in particular, the doctrine of Hero-worship—it is probable that this statement requires some qualification. The work of Fichte in which that doctrine is stated most clearly and fully is the Staatslehre; and this, although it belongs to the close of his life, can hardly be described as a popular book. It must be remembered, however, on the one hand, that the Staatslehre is far less rigorous in its method than the earlier writings; and, on the other hand, that, though the doctrine of Heroes is more explicitly stated in the Staatslehre than in any other of Fichte's treatises, it is still found—as least in germ and by implication—in the