"The good man ... gave you the idea of a life that had been full of sufferings ... the deep eyes, of a light hazel, were as full of sorrow as inspiration; confused pain looked mildly from them, as in a kind of mild astonishment. The whole figure and air, good and amiable otherwise, might be called flabby and irresolute; expressive of weakness under possibility of strength.... He spoke as if preaching--preaching earnestly and hopelessly the weightiest things." Carlyle himself had all the character and industry that Coleridge lacked, and it was another side of German idealism that had appealed to him. The Scotchman was of the same fibre and stock as that other half-Scotchman, Kant. Here was the source from which he had drawn his inspiration. We see in Carlyle the same moral earnestness, the same "toughness" of thought, the same absence of "sentimental moonshine." From Kant, too, he derives a vigorous independence of thought, a religious respect for individuality, a horror of shams and affectation. Kant was a true child of the Reformation, and Carlyle is a genuine disciple. In a single important respect, however, he differed from (and improved upon) his master. Kant lacked, or at least did not display, the saving grace of humour; in Carlyle this quality looks out from every page--keen, satirical, sometimes bitter, sometimes grotesque; he ridiculed his own generation, its vices, its prejudices, its superstitions. SARTOR RESARTUS.--For our purpose, _Sartor Resartus_--that profound and humorous book--is Carlyle's masterpiece: here all the characteristic Kantian doctrines may be found. The "philosophy of clothes"--which is the quaint title behind which Kantian idealism is made to masquerade--starts from the thought that just as an acquaintance with his clothes will not reveal to us the man, so an acquaintance with _phenomena_ (which is all that science can claim to give us) cannot reveal to us the real ground of existence, which remains an inscrutable mystery. We must "look on clothes till they become transparent," if we could understand reality. "To the eye of vulgar Logic what is man? An omnivorous biped that wears breeches. To the eye of pure Reason what is he? A Soul, a Spirit, and divine Apparition." And so with Nature; to science it is a mechanism, to the understanding heart it is "the living garment of God." "It is written, the Heavens and the Earth shall fade away like a Vesture; which indeed they are: the Time-Vesture of the Eternal.... The whole External Universe and what it holds is but Clothing...." The visible world is but a symbol of a profound and awful reality; and all Nature's products, in their degree, symbols as well: but of these, man is the highest. "The true SHEKINAH is Man: where else is the GOD'S PRESENCE manifested, not to our eyes only, but to our hearts, as in our fellow-man?"