" _Scepticism_ proper fares as hardly in his hands as
definite denial. It is, he declares, "a fatal condition," and, almost in
the spirit of the inquisitors, he attributes to it moral vice as well as
intellectual weakness, calling it an "atrophy, a disease of the whole
soul," "a state of mental paralysis," etc. His fallacious habit of appeal
to consequences, which in others he would have scouted as a commonplace
of the pulpit, is conspicuous in his remark on Hume's view of life as "a
most melancholy theory," according to which, in the words of Jean Paul,
"heaven becomes a gas, God a force, and the second world a grave." He
fails to see that all such appeals are beside the question; and deserts
the ground of his answer to John Sterling's expostulation, "that is
downright Pantheism": "What if it were Pot-theism if it is _true_?" It is
the same inconsistency which, in practice, led his sympathy for suffering
to override his Stoic theories; but it vitiated his reasoning, and made
it impossible for him to appreciate the calm, yet legitimately emotional,
religiosity of Mill. Carlyle has vetoed all forms of so-called
_Orthodoxy_--whether Catholic or Protestant, of Churches High or Low; he
abhorred Puseyism, Jesuitry, spoke of the "Free Kirk and other rubbish,"
and recorded his definite disbelief, in any ordinary sense, in Revelation
and in Miracles.
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