Past and Present: Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII.Carlyle, Thomas
Philosophy
Past and Present: Thomas Carlyle's Collected Works, Vol. XIII.
Carlyle, Thomas
Great Britain -- Social conditions -- 19th century; Social problems
Formulas the very skin and muscular tissue of a Man's Life: Living
Formulas and dead. Habit the deepest law of human nature. A pathway
through the pathless. Nationalities. Pulpy infancy, kneaded, baked
into any form you choose: The Man of Business; the hard-handed
Labourer; the genus Dandy. No Mortal out of the depths of Bedlam but
lives by Formulas. (p. 157.)--The hosts and generations of brave men
Oblivion has swallowed: Their crumbled dust, the soil our life-fruit
grows on. Invention of Speech, Forms of Worship; Methods of Justice.
This English Land, here and now, the summary of what was wise and
noble, and accordant with God's Truth, in all the generations of
English Men. The thing called 'Fame.' (161.)
BOOK III--THE MODERN WORKER.
Chap. I. _Phenomena._
How men have 'forgotten God;' taken the Fact of this Universe as it
_is not_, God's Laws become a Greatest-Happiness Principle, a
Parliamentary Expediency. Man has lost the _soul_ out of him, and
begins to find the want of it. (p. 171.)--The old Pope of Rome, with
his stuffed dummy to do the kneeling for him. Few men that worship by
the rotatory Calabash, do it in half so great, frank or effectual a
way. (173.)--Our Aristocracy no longer able to _do_ its work, and not
in the least conscious that it has any work to do. The Champion of
England 'lifted into his saddle.' The Hatter in the Strand, mounting a
huge lath-and-plaster Hat. Our noble ancestors have fashioned for us,
in how many thousand senses, a 'life-road;' and we their sons are
madly, literally enough, 'consuming the way.' (175.)
Chap. II. _Gospel of Mammonism._
Heaven and Hell, often as the words are on our tongue, got to be
fabulous or semi-fabulous for most of us. The real 'Hell' of the
English. Cash-payment, _not_ the sole or even chief relation of human
beings. Practical Atheism, and its despicable fruits. (p. 181.)--One
of Dr. Alison's melancholy facts: A poor Irish Widow, in the Lanes of
Edinburgh, _proving_ her sisterhood. Until we get a human _soul_
within us, all things are _im_possible: Infatuated geese, with
feathers and without. (185.)
Chap. III. _Gospel of Dilettantism._
Mammonism at least works, but 'Go gracefully idle in Mayfair,' what
does or can that mean?--Impotent, insolent Donothingism in Practice
and Saynothingism in Speech. No man now speaks a plain word: Insincere
Speech the prime material of insincere Action. (p. 188.)--Moslem
parable of Moses and the Dwellers by the Dead Sea: The Universe
_become_ a Humbug to the Apes that thought it one. (190.)
Chap. IV. _Happy._
All work noble; and every noble crown a crown of thorns. Man's pitiful
pretension to be what he calls 'happy.' His Greatest-Happiness
Principle fast becoming a rather unhappy one. Byron's large audience.
A philosophical Doctor: A disconsolate Meat-jack, gnarring and
creaking with rust and work. (p. 192.)--The only 'happiness' a brave
man ever troubled himself much about, the happiness to get his work
done. (195.)
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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