Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/240

230, and on account of which his contemporaries styled him latterly the Chelsea Prophet.

"The first name affixed to Carlyle to signify a perception of the difference of his ways of thinking from those of other people was Mystic. This was the name given to him long ago in that Edinburgh circle round Jeffrey which he first stirred by his personal peculiarities when he was a resident in Comely Bank, and by his articles on German subjects. He seemed to be the apostle of an unknown something called 'German Mysticism,' and to be trying to found a school of 'English Mystics.' He dallied with the term himself for a while, and even took it with him to London. Intrinsically, however, there could have been no more absurd designation. By the whole cast of his intellect Carlyle was even the reverse of a mystic, constrained as he was always to definiteness of intellectual conception and to optical clearness of representation; and, though he had a kindly eye toward the Mystics, he could make nothing of them except by unmysticizing them—his essay on Novalis, for example, being an unsatisfactory attempt to extract gleams out of the opaque. It was the novelty of Carlyle's principles to those among whom they were first propounded, the strangeness of the objects he tried to bring within their ken, that occasioned the resort to such a misfitting epithet. A far fitter designation would have been Transcendentalist. Pardon me if I detain you a little with this word from the scholastic nomenclature and its applicability to Carlyle. It is easy enough to understand, and we have really no other name so suitable for the thing.

"A Transcendentalist in philosophy is the very opposite of what we call a Secularist. He is the opponent of that system of philosophy which "apprehends no further than this world and squares one's life according," that system of philosophy which regards the visible universe of time, space, and human experience as the sum total of all reality, and existing humanity in the midst of this universe as the topmost thing now in being. Beyond, and around, and even in this visible universe, the Transcendentalist holds—this world of sun, moon, and stars, and of the earth and human history in the midst—there is a supernatural world, a world of eternal and infinite mystery, invisible and inconceivable, yet most real, and so interconnected with the ongoings of the visible universe that constant reference to it is the supreme necessity of the human spirit, the highest duty of man, and the indispensable condition of all that is best in the human genius. In this sense Carlyle was a transcendentalist from the very first. He believed in a world of eternal and infinite realities transcending our finite world of time, space, sense, experience, and conceivability.

"In the scholastic nomenclature, however, there may be recognized two distinct varieties of Transcendentalism, There is, first, what may be called Idealistic Transcendentalism or Transcendental Idealism. By this idealistic theory all the apparent universe of known