No printed labels will stick to him: when we seek to corner him
by argument he thunders and lightens. Emerson complains that he failed
to extract from him a definite answer about Immortality. Neither by
syllogism nor by crucible could Bacon himself have made the "Form" of
Carlyle to confess itself. But call him what we will--essential Calvinist
or recalcitrant Neologist, Mystic, Idealist, Deist or Pantheist,
practical Absolutist, or "the strayed reveller" of Radicalism--he is
consistent in his even bigoted antagonism to all Utilitarian solutions of
the problems of the world. One of the foremost physicists of our time was
among his truest and most loyal friends; they were bound together by the
link of genius and kindred political views; and Carlyle was himself an
expert in mathematics, the mental science that most obviously subserves
physical research: but of Physics themselves (astronomy being scarcely a
physical science) his ignorance was profound, and his abusive criticisms
of such men as Darwin are infantile. This intellectual defect, or
rather vacuum, left him free to denounce material views of life with
unconditioned vehemence. "Will the whole upholsterers," he exclaims in
his half comic, sometimes nonsensical, vein, "and confectioners of modern
Europe undertake to make one single shoeblack happy!" And more seriously
of the railways, without whose noisy aid he had never been able to visit
the battle-fields of Friedrich II.
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