The words may be little more than a faint echo of what he had said, a score of years earlier, in Sartor. But the faith that lies behind them is the same. And the words themselves, suggested as they are in all probability by a famous passage of Kant,[1] are a significant reminder that, in the first instance, this faith was drawn from the teaching of Kant and the other writers, whether philosophers or poets, of Germany.
That Carlyle never succeeded in 'getting his poor message fully delivered to the world'—that he never explained, directly and unmistakably, all that, to his own mind, was involved in 'the Exodus from Houndsditch'—is deeply to be regretted. But the reason is plain. It is that, Sartor once completed, he was irresistibly drawn into the more pressing problems of practical affairs; that his mind came more and more to be fastened upon matters of action and of social or political reform.[2] These are the problems with which he chiefly concerned himself after the first stage of his literary career. And on these he has left a mark perhaps even deeper than that which he stamped on the more speculative problems with which he started. Can we say that here too he was influenced by the Germans? Is it true that in his treatment of social, as of intellectual, questions he owed any serious debt to Fichte?
The importance of Carlyle in the history of political and social thought is, firstly, that he was among the earliest in this country to revolt against the individualist theory of society; and secondly, that incensed by what he regarded as the incompetence of democracy, he took refuge in the right of the strong man, the hero, to guide and control democracy for its good. The former principle is that which stands in the forefront of his earlier utterances on these
