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most charmed his own imagination. But it may be said that society will always be made up of different classes-workingmen, tradesmen, professional men, magistrates, rulers—and that Comte merely professes to have given them that scientific arrangement which shall be for the highest and truest welfare of all concerned. Here, again, we see the neglect of the same great fact that men are led by the Imagination. For there is all the difference between my following a particular trade, art, or profession, of my own free will and choice, and my being compelled by another to follow it because I am told it will be ultimately for my best and truest welfare. In the first instance, the imagination is free to range at large, without let or hindrance, amid an infinite variety of thought and aspiration, and with no limits to its flight save those which arise from fate and nature themselves. The result is that men awake to a sense of responsibility; they learn the great laws of the world in their contact with the many sides of life; their manhood becomes firmer in its fibre, like trees that have to hold their own against the wintry blasts; and, as in America, they can turn their hands to anything, and, toss them how you will, they will always fall on their feet. But, on the other hand, when a man is pressed into an occupation by the will of others or another, without regard to the secret aspirations which have fascinated his own mind, then imagination is crushed, life becomes a stagnant marsh, a dreary mechanical routine without excitement, ambition, or hope, sinking at last into torpor or despair, relieved by intrigue, insurrection, or crime. And who is to claim this omniscient power of determining the position each man is best fitted to occupy? In the last resort, some poor creature like ourselves.

Such are the utopias into which Comte falls by making society as a whole the end of his political system, and not the elevation and expansion of the individual.

CHAPTER IV.

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THE POLITICS OF CARLYLE.

F we turn now to Carlyle we shall find that he, too, proposes as his end the welfare of society as a whole, and not the welfare of the individual, and consequently tightens the bonds of what he calls Duty, and represses Expansion and Liberty. I am aware that Carlyle has been accused of making the Individual, and not Humanity the central point of his political system; nevertheless I venture to assert that although a cursory glance may lend colour to this view, a deep insight into his philosophy as a whole will not bear it out. In his Sartor Resartus, for example, we find that he figures society as a living organism, of which Government is the protecting skin, Industry the working muscle, and Religion the nervous tissue and life-giving heart. The generations of mankind, too, he makes correspond with the days of the individual; birth and death with the morning and evening bells that call him to labour and to rest. And just as in the individual, growth, development, and decay go on together, so do they in society, which also has its periods of weakness and vigor, of youth, manhood, decrepitude, and new birth. Elsewhere he says that Society is the vital articulation of many individuals into a new collective individual-a second all-embracing life in which our individual lives have room to expand and develope. Hence, 'to figure Society as endowed with life, is scarcely a metaphor, but is rather the statement of a fact by such methods as language affords.'

If Carlyle, then, regards Society as an organism, we may know beforehand that his main concern will be to keep each individual strictly in subordination to the interests of the whole. And, accordingly, we find that his whole gospel is

that each man shall occupy the position and do the duty assigned him, and in so doing find his highest welfare. There is nothing, perhaps, which he deprecates more than the tendency in modern peoples to rupture the bonds that formerly kept man dependent on man, and thereby make room for more and more individual liberty and expansion. He sees with a shudder the successive cords cut one by one-the freeing of the slave; the making contracts between master and servant, employer and workman, temporary instead of permanent; the abolition of all political and commercial restriction ;—until, with 'laissez-faire' and 'supply and demand' as our ultimate political evangel, he exclaims in despair, Cash payment is now the sole nexus between man and man.' So deep, indeed, is his concern for union among men, that if he cannot have it spontaneous and natural, he will have it mechanical and fictitious; if he cannot have society united by love, he will have it welded together by a despotism of force.

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So far, then, Comte and Carlyle agree in regarding Humanity as an organism, and consequently in drawing the bonds of order so tightly as to repress expansion and liberty. But they differ in the attributes with which they invest Humanity. For while Comte elevates it into a Supreme Being, and makes it the object, not only of his political schemes, but also of his religion, Carlyle makes it the object of his political schemes only, and centres his religion in God. The result is that, while with Comte there is no wall separating religion from politics, but, on the contrary, his political views can be deduced directly from his religious ones; with Carlyle there is a vast chasm between them, which can only be bridged over indirectly the chasm that separates cause from effect, the known from the unknown, the finite from the infinite. Now the way in which he bridges over this chasm is worthy of attention. He believes that the idea of God is of no use whatever for practical direction in this world, but is of service only as a great background of trust and inspiration. It is too

vague, shadowy, and immense, to be realised by human thought or spoken of in human words. For practical direction, therefore, it is necessary that the idea should be embodied in tangible and sensuous symbols and representations; and of these symbols the best, according to Carlyle, is the Hero, or Great Man. All the great religions of the world have exemplified this, for they have all had, on the one hand, a Supreme Being, and on the other, some individual who was His symbol and interpreter on earth, such as Moses, Jesus, and Mahomet. Accordingly, while Carlyle makes God the real soul and centre of human life, he makes the Great Man the centre of practical affairs, and regards him, and his fellows who have gone before, as the keystones of the successive arches of that bridge of Time which stretches between the two Eternities.

But although both Comte and Carlyle thus agree in giving great men the supreme direction of affairs, and in placing the lives and fortunes of other men at their disposal, they nevertheless differ in their motive for so doing. Comte, believing that the knowledge of physical, moral, and intellectual laws is the only solid basis for human progress, would reverence the Great Man only in so far as he discovers and announces these laws, and applies them to human affairs. Carlyle, on the other hand, believing that we are led by Imagination, and that the imaginations of men are more roused and facinated by a concrete human personality, than by any mere catalogue of abstract laws however true, would reverence the Great Man on his own account. They differ also in the way in which they would distribute the supreme power. Comte, believing that action and speculation are rarely combined in an equal degree in the same person; that the philosopher who discovers the great laws of the world has quite a different order of mind from the practical man who applies them; would divide the supreme power into the temporal and spiritual, placing the former, as we have seen, in the hands of Three Bankers, and the latter in the hands of the High Priest of Humanity. Carlyle, on the other hand,

believing that the direction and administration of affairs is only a form of general insight; that the man who can discover, could, if he chose, equally well apply; that the prophet, priest, or philosopher would make a warrior, statesman, or king; believing further that the moral and intellectual faculties are but two sides of the same thing; that the man of good insight must also have had patience, candour, openness of mind and perseverance, all of which are characteristic of men of action: would unite the temporal and spiritual powers in the hands of one person—the Hero, or supremely Great Man of the age.

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The Great Man, then, as supreme director of affairs, receiving loyalty and obedience in return for guidance and protection, is Carlyle's solution of the problem of society, as, indeed, it is the form which he believes society will eventually assume when the present transitionary and diseased stage of liberty and equality' shall have passed away. We shall readily perceive the grounds of this confidence if we consider what his conception is of a truly healthy society. It is a society where men are all actuated by one aim, and that, too, an aim outside of themselves and their own self-interests; and not, like the present, where there are as many aims as there are political doctors or quacks, and where the motto is each for himself and the Devil take the hindmost.' It is a society where men are united in bonds of mutual love and helpfulness, and not one where they are merely aggregated together, and where there is no bond uniting them except that of cash payment' and 'supply and demand.' It is a society where each man's duty is to keep himself strictly in subordination to the interests of the whole; and not one where each man's right is to follow the leadings of his own inclination or genius. It is a society where men are loyal to those above them, and helpful to those beneath them; and not one where all are alike equal and independent, and, where a suspicion of servility even the dogleech hastens to disavow.' In short, it is a society characterised by unity of aim, loyalty to superiors, care for inferiors, and love and

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