less than in the direct light which it recognized in man himself—he found the new faith, and the new motive to action and patience, of which he was in search.
There are two passages of his published works in which Carlyle makes explicit reference to these doctrines. One of these occurs in the Lectures on Heroes (v). The other, which is the earlier and therefore for our purposes the more significant of the two, is to be found in the essay on The State of German Literature (1827), to which allusion has been made so often:—
'According to Fichte, there is a "Divine Idea" pervading the visible Universe, which visible Universe is indeed but its symbol and sensible manifestation, having in itself no meaning, or even true existence independent of it. To the mass of men this Divine Idea of the world lies hidden: yet to discern it, to seize it, and live wholly in it, is the condition of all genuine virtue, knowledge, freedom; and the end, therefore, of all spiritual effort in every age. Literary men are the appointed interpreters of this Divine Idea; a perpetual priesthood, we might say, standing forth, generation after generation, as the dispensers and living types of God's everlasting wisdom, to show it in their writings and actions, in such particular form as their own particular times require it in. For each age, by the law of its nature, is different from every other age, and demands a different representation of the Divine Idea, the essence of which is the same in all; so that the literary man of one century is only by mediation and reinterpretation applicable to the wants of another. But in every century, every man who labours, be it in what province he may, to teach others, must first have possessed himself of the Divine Idea, or, at least, be with his whole heart and his whole soul striving after it.'[1]
The date of this passage enables us to carry back Carlyle's acquaintance with Fichte to the very beginning of his literary career; to the years immediately following his first venture in authorship, the Life of Schiller, and immediately preceding the composition of his earlier Essays and that of Sartor
- ↑ Miscellanies, i. pp. 68-9. The reference, as Carlyle tells us in Heroes, is to Fichte's Das Wesen des Gelehrten.
