Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/241

Rh external realities—sun, moon, stars, rocks, clouds, earth, and human history and tradition—is resolved or reduced into mere present thinkings of your mind or my mind, a mere complex phantasmagory of the present human spirit; and therefore it is through this present human spirit that one has to seek the all-explaining bond of connection between the real world of finite nature and the real and infinite supernatural world. Now, though Carlyle was acquainted with this idealistic theory, had evident likings for it, and now and then favored it with a passing glance of exposition, I can not find that he had ever worked out the theory in all its bearings—an enormously difficult business—or adopted it intimately for his own behoof, he remained to the end what may be called a Realistic Transcendentalist or Transcendental Realist. By this is meant that be was satisfied to think of the world of space and time, and of all physical and historical realities, as having substantially existed, in its essential fabric at least, very much as we imagine it by an independent tenure from the Infinite, distinct from that of all past or present conceiving minds inserted into it and in traffic with it.

"Here, however, we may note an interesting peculiarity of his special form of Realistic Transcendentalism, which latterly gave him some trouble. Though be talks of 'rude nations,' 'rude times,' etc., and recognized perhaps a certain progress in human conditions and even in the human organism, be seems essentially to have always thought of humanity as a self-contained entity, fully fashioned within itself from the first, and cut off from all its material surroundings and from any priority of material beginnings. Hence his oppugnancy in his latter days to the modern scientific doctrine of evolution as brought into vogue more especially by the reasonings of Darwin. For a transcendentalist of the idealistic sort the doctrine of evolution can have no terrors. If the world of space, time, and history is but a fabrication of our present thinkings, a phantasmagory of the present human spirit, what does it matter how much our present thinkings may change, or how many æons of so-called time and imagined processes and marches of events we may find it necessary to throw into our phantasmagory? For the transcendental realist the difficulty is greater. Though he has the ultimate relief of believing that the entire procession or evolution of things physical as modern science would represent it—from the Universal Nebula on to the dispersed starry immensity, and so to the solar system, our earth as a planet in that system, and the history of that separate earth through the ages of its existence since it became separate—is but one vast forth-putting or manifestation of the inconceivable Absolute, he does not like to think of himself, the paragon of animals, or of the human mind and soul, as in any way really derived from this antecedent physical evolution, and more especially from those nearer portions of it which concern our separate earth and lead from protoplasmic slime, through differentiated bestialism, to a