Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 01.djvu/17

Rh Neither prophet nor doctor: no, nor yet philosopher either. The word 'philosophy' and its derivatives are among the hardest-worked vocables in the language. The substantive has been applied to everything, from a theory of the universe to the minutest researches in a single branch of physical science; its adjectival form is used indiscriminately to describe a variety of the human temperament, and the contents of an optician's shop. Men, who never so much as heard of the Stoics, have been called 'philosophers' for meeting adversity with fortitude; quadrants and sextants have been dignified with the name of 'philosophical' instruments. And there was hardly less laxity in the employment of the word 'philosophy' as applied to the teachings of Carlyle, a writer who was alike ignorant of philosophical systems, and contemptuous of philosophical method, dismissing the former as 'word-spinning,' and the latter as 'logic chopping,' and whose own metaphysic was a mere tissue of poetic rhapsodies, as his ethic was a mere series of intuitional and unreasoned dogmas. One hardly knows whether Carlyle himself was aware of the popular designation of him in later years as the 'philosopher of Chelsea,' or, if he was, what he thought of the cognomen. But there can, at least, be no doubt that the appellation was one which he ought in common consistency to have emphatically, if not indignantly, repudiated.

It is interesting, indeed, to inquire what system of philosophy the disciples of the master could have managed to extract from his writings. A philosopher, whether so self-styled or not, may be expected either to suggest some speculative solution of the problems of man's origin, man's destiny, man's duty, and above all, man's relation to the external world, or, if he is a pure sceptic, definitely to pronounce these problems unsoluble. But, while Carlyle would presumably have rejected pure dogmatic scepticism, such as Hume's, with impatience, there is, nevertheless, not one of the questions connected with these high matters, to which he has any definite answer to propound. To some of them he offers no reply at all; to others he replies according to the personal Rh