Page:Essays and studies; by members of the English Association, volume 1.djvu/199

 matters, those which are to be found in Sartor, and, to some extent, in the French Revolution. The latter principle is that which underlies the whole of his later works, from the Lectures on Heroes (1840) to Frederick the Great. Round these two principles may be grouped all, or nearly all, of what Carlyle taught upon political and social matters; from his onslaught on individualist economics to his defence of negro slavery and his attack on parliamentary government for the extension of the franchise.

Now it is manifest that in these questions any writer—and Carlyle, with his strong passions and keen sense of picturesque detail, perhaps more than most—must of necessity be more closely bound by the accidents of local circumstance than he would be in dealing with purely speculative problems. It follows that any foreign influence must work in a more indirect manner, that its effects cannot be expected to show themselves so openly, in the one case as in the other, his being understood, the strange thing is not that the influence of Fichte should be so hard, but that it should be so easy, to trace in the political writings of Carlyle. In fact, to any one who is in the secret, the voice of Fichte may be heard in them from beginning to end. We confine ourselves to the two cardinal principles indicated above.

The history of the two men in this matter offers a curious resemblance. Fichte, as will be manifest to any one who reads his early work in defence of the French Revolution (1793), had started from the most extreme form of individualism. But deeper thought, and the gradual widening of his speculative outlook, had brought him step by step to principles the very opposite of those with which he had begun. The stages by which this change was brought about may be traced in a succession of remarkable writings, of which the most crucial are the Grundlage des Naturrechts (1796) and the Staatslehre, published in 1813, after the author's death. The former marks the beginning of his emancipa-