Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 01.djvu/18

x mood, or the controversial exigencies, of the moment, and therefore in half-a-dozen different ways. He seems on the metaphysical side to have been more or less unconsciously a Fichtean Idealist: at any rate no transcendental German of them all, has insisted more strongly on the supremacy and even the solitude of the individual consciousness, and on the shadowy nature of the external world of sense. Yet the ethical affinities of this theory of perception, and its easy avenues of exit into indifferentism, fatalism, hedonism, and many other 'isms,' which he would have heartily objurgated, never seems to have occurred to him. There is no sign of his having appreciated the difficulty, yet the necessity, of fitting his metaphysical idealism into the framework of his essentially and austerely realistic ethics.

As to those ethics themselves, and the moral cosmology, so to call it, with which they were associated, what do they amount to? That there is a Divine Creator and Governor of the universe, and a prescribed law of human conduct which man will violate at his peril; that the distinctions between right and wrong are fixed from eternity, and the recognition of them implanted ineradicably in the heart of man; that truth is supreme and will ultimately and irresistibly prevail over falsehood; and that suffering is attached to ill-doing by a law of inevitable sequence—these, and a few other correlated dicta of equal simplicity, sum up the whole of Carlyle's theology, just as they composed the entire theological equipment of the Greek tragedians. As to his ethics: that the world is not a hunting-ground of pleasure but an arena of duty; that man must learn to dispense with the happiness of gratified longings, and to seek and ensue only the blessings of right action; and that whether there be or be not a future state of rewards and punishments, the obligation to such action is no less imperative in these maxims, and their like, are contained the whole ethical law and prophets for Carlyle as for the Stoics before him. There is nothing in the one set of doctrines which is not to be found in Sophocles, nor anything in the other which we could not