Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 28.djvu/245

Rh care to pack up what was really their own and bring that along with them."

The scientific deficiency of Carlyle's mind was nowhere displayed more strikingly than in his scornful rejection of what science has accomplished in the very fields which he himself cultivated—i. e., the phenomena of human and social affairs. Political economy, as is well known, was his abomination. He is forever talking of "facts," but forever deriding those who studied them methodically. On this point, Professor Masson observes:

"What was even worse, Carlyle not only refused the trouble of considerations of the merely mechanical kind himself, but regarded too generally with contempt the labors and speculations of others in that region. His impatience of reasoned political science in any form, and especially in the form of that modern political economy which he derided as 'the dismal science,' really shut him out, more than he was himself aware, from that intimacy with the 'fact of things' which be defined so energetically as the all-essential necessity for men of all sorts and the sole attainable wisdom. It is by science only, by reasoned investigation only, that we can know, in any department, what IS the real 'fact of things'; and till we know, from the teachings of strict political science, whether in its present form of so-called political economy, or in some larger and better form, all that we can know of the real 'fact of things' in that department, our practical efforts in politics and philanthropy will continue to be, as they have too much been heretofore, mere knocking of our heads against stone walls, mere pourings of water into sieves. Not less in all matters and contemplations, physical and cosmological, must we receive our instructions as to the real 'fact of things' from the sciences thereto appertaining. If science tells us surely and conclusively that such and such was and has been the course of actual physical nature, then we are bound, whether we like it or not, to imagine the past physical course of things precisely in that manner; and, if we persist in imagining it one whit otherwise, we incur the guilt of opposing the light, and are untrue to the 'fact of things.' Carlyle, as we have seen, acknowledged this; but it was but a passing acknowledgment. He was too old, his inveteracy in the constitutional faiths of his own spirit was too confirmed, to permit him to adjust these faiths to the new cosmological conceptions which science was making imperative in his later days, or even to perceive that it was of any great consequence that this should be done."