An Outline of

The Doctrines of Thomas Carlyle.

PART FIRST.

I.

Insight.

(1) ...We are firm believers in the maxim that, for all right judgment of any man or thing, it is useful, nay essential, to see his good qualities before pronouncing on his bad.' 6. 218.

...Who has ever forgotten those lines of Tacitus; inserted as a small, transitory, altogether trifling circumstance in the history of such a potentate as Nero? To us it is the most earnest, sad and sternly significant passage that we know to exist in writing: "So, for the quieting of this rumour, Nero judicially charged with the crime, and punished with most studied severities, that class, hated for their general wickedness, whom the vulgar

1Of his having set fire to Rome,

A

called Christians. The originator of that name was one Christ, who, in the reign of Tiberius, suffered death by sentence of the Procurator, Pontius Pilate. The baneful superstition, thereby repressed for the time, again broke out, not only over Judea, the native soil of that mischief, but in the City also, where from every side all atrocious and abominable things collect and flourish." (Tacit. Annal. 15. 44.) Tacitus was the wisest, most penetrating man of his generation; and to such depth, and no deeper, has he seen into this transaction, the most important that has occurred or can occur in the annals of mankind.

'Nor is it only to those primitive ages, when religions took their rise, and a man of pure and high mind appeared not merely as a teacher and philosopher, but as a priest and prophet, that our observation: applies. The same uncertainty, in estimating present things and men, holds more or less in all times; for in all times, even in those which seem most trivial, and open to research, human society rests on inscrutably deep foundations; which he is of all others the most mistaken, who fancies he has explored to the bottom.' 7. 121.

(2) 'To know a thing, what we can call knowing, a man must first love the thing, sympathise with it: that is, be virtuously related to it.' 13. 99.

'The beginning of all Thought, worth the

name, is Love; and the wise head never yet was, without first the generous heart...' 4. 267.

'How can a man, without clear vision in his heart first of all, have any clear vision in the head? It is impossible!' 14. 83.

(3)...If we really desire to understand the truth on any subject, not merely, as is much more common, to confirm our already existing opinions, and gratify this and the other pitiful claim of vanity or malice in respect of it, tolerance may be regarded as the most indispensable of all prerequisites; the condition, indeed, by which alone any real progress in the question becomes possible. In respect of our fellowmen, and all real insight into their characters, this is especially true. No character, we may affirm, was ever rightly understood till it had first been regarded with a certain feeling, not of tolerance only, but of sympathy. For here, more than in any other case, it is verified that the heart sees farther than the head.

Let us

be sure, our enemy is not that hateful being we are too apt to paint him. His vices and basenesses lie combined in far other order before his own mind than before ours; and under colours which palliate them, may perhaps exhibit them as virtues. Were he the wretch of our imagining, his life would be a burden to himself: for it is not by bread alone that the basest mortal lives; a certain approval of conscience is equally essential even to physical