. . . Long before he launched his sarcasms at human progress,
there had been a conviction among thinkers that it was not the hero
that developed the race, but a deep mysterious energy in the race that
produced the hero; that the wave produced the bubble, and not the bubble
the wave. But the moment a theory of evolution saw the light it was a
fact. The old cosmogony, on which were built _Sartor Resartus_ and the
Calvinism of Ecclefechan, were gone. Ecclefechan had declared that the
earth did not move; but it moved nevertheless. The great stream of modern
thought has advanced; the theory of evolution has been universally
accepted; nations, it is acknowledged, produce kings, and kings are
denied the faculty of producing nations."
_Taliter, qualiter;_ but one or two remarks on the incisive summary
of this adroit and able theorist are obvious. First, the implied
assertion,--"Ecclefechan had declared that the earth did not move,"--that
Carlyle was in essential sympathy with the Inquisitors who confronted
Galileo with the rack, is perhaps the strangest piece of recent criticism
extant: for what is his _French Revolution_ but a cannonade in three
volumes, reverberating, as no other book has done, a hurricane of
revolutionary thought and deed, a final storming of old fortresses, an
assertion of the necessity of movement, progress, and upheaval? Secondly,
every new discovery is apt to be discredited by new shibboleths, and
one-sided exaggerations of its range.
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