Status Updates From Thomas Carlyle

And if a man goes on a tearing hunt after shams, as Carlyle did, it’s is pro le he will find little or nothing real. He is tcariiio- off the branches to find tree.

“It is an astonishing thing that Carlyle's " French lle\'olution " contrives to be as admirable and as accurate a history as it is, while from one end to the other there is hardly a suggestion that he comprehended the moral and political theories which were the guiding stars of the French Revolutionists.” According to Chesterton, Carlyle never understood the philosophies of others.

No historian ever realised so strongly the recondite and ill-digested fact that history has consisted of human beings, each isolated, each vacillating, each living in an eternal present ; or, in other Avords, that history has not consisted of crowds, or kings, or Acts of Parliament, or systems of government, or articles of belief

Carlyle was ])atient witli facts, dates^ documents, int()lcial)ly wearisome memoirs; hut lie was not patient with tlie soul of man. He was not patient with ideas, theories^ tendencies, outside iiis own pliilosoph

“Rationalism is, of course, that power which makes people invent sewing machines, understand Euclid, reform vestries, pull out teeth, and number the fixed stars. Irrationalism is that other force, if possible more essential, which makes men look at sunsets, laugh at jokes, go on crusades, write poems, enter monasteries, and jump over hay-cocks.” Thomas Carlyle by G.K. Chesterton,

Carlyle was patent with fact but not with the ideas of men.

Chesterton, using his tendency to look at things through the lens of opposites, attempts to explain Carlyle’s theories of hero worship. There are some who find grace being obeyed and others who find grace in obeying. This flues in the face of modern ideas of equality even as reality presents it.

“Only a very superficial critic will think that Carlyle was misanthropic because he was surely.”

“the real defect in his nature was an impatience with others men’s ideas.”