Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/195

 popular lectures, Das Wesen des Gelehrten and others, which we know to have been the main source of Carlyle's inspiration.

On the whole, therefore, it may be said that it was the popular rather than the scientific writings of Fichte to which Carlyle turned for guidance; and that it was the later, rather than the earlier, developments of Fichte's system that appealed most strongly both to his reason and his imagination. This, indeed, was only to be expected. He had little turn, and still less care, for analysis. What he sought was a principle which should enable him to read the conflicting facts of experience in a new light, to believe that he had grasped the unity which lay behind them, above all to win a new faith in place of that which he had been driven to abandon, and, through that new faith, a new strength for action and endurance.

Now this is just what the earlier system of Fichte—in which everything centres, or appears to centre, round the individual—was little likely to supply. Its form is abstruse. In matter and substance, it is still hampered by the individualist preconceptions from which it is struggling to escape. On the other hand, the later and more popular treatises put into the hands of Carlyle exactly the weapons which he required. He found there a creed which, while setting the outward world and the facts of outward experience in a quite secondary place, at the same time gave them a dignity and a religious significance which they had never had for him before. He found the laws of natural science presented no longer as isolated and independent facts, but as the revelation of a divine power working in and through them, and as discoverable by man only in so far as he himself is a higher and more complete revelation of that power, at once a part of the natural order and, in a greater or less degree, exalted above it. And in the double light of this creed—in the reflected light which it shed upon the outward world no