Page:Works of Thomas Carlyle - Volume 01.djvu/19

Rh have learned from Marcus Aurelius; and since the dramas of the Athenian poet, and the meditations of the Roman emperor are still extant, there would be no need for them to rise from the dead, and seek a joint re-incarnation in the person of Carlyle.

How came it then, it will be asked, that this philosopher without a philosophy exerted so powerful an influence over English thought throughout the second thirty years of the present century? and how comes it that now, though that influence has long since spent itself, he still wields, and promises to wield for an indefinite time to come, a power of another kind? Answers to both these questions are not far to seek. The former of the two phenomena is to be explained by the fact that though Carlyle was no teacher in the proper philosophic sense of the word, he was during the day of his influence such a preacher as the world has rarely seen. It is common and perhaps natural enough to confuse the two functions of 'teaching' and 'preaching,' but their distinction is, nevertheless, fundamental. To teach is, in strictness, to impart knowledge to a learner which he did not possess before; while the distinctive purpose of preaching is to give vitality and motive power to knowledge which he already possesses. The fact that in some cases the imparted knowledge is itself new, and the teacher to that extent a preacher also, is an immaterial accident not affecting the essence of his function. Otherwise a Christian missionary to the heathen would stand on the same level as the Founder of his faith. In nineteen cases, moreover, out of twenty the preacher is not addressing the heathen. He does not deal in new, but in forgotten, truths. His object is not to enlarge deficient knowledge, but to awaken slumbering attention; and his success in the attempt will of course be measured partly by his own power of applying the required intellectual or moral stimulus, and partly by the readiness of his hearers to receive it.

Seldom has the concurrence of these two conditions been more complete than it was during the period covered by Carlyle's earlier writings. Then, if ever in human history, the hour and