What, then, was the nature of the message of peace which Germany, through Kant, Fichte, and Goethe, brought to the storm-tossed soul of Carlyle? When Carlyle began to think seriously, two antagonistic conceptions of life, the orthodox and the rationalist, were struggling for mastery in the field of thought. The orthodox conception, into which he had been born, and with which his father and mother had fronted the Eternities, had given way under the solvent of modern thought. Carlyle's belief in Christianity as a revelation seems to have dropped from him without much of a struggle, somewhat after the style of George Eliot. His mental tortures appear to have arisen from spiritual hunger, from an inability to fill the place vacated by the old beliefs. Had he lived fifty years earlier, Carlyle would have been invited to find salvation in the easy-going, drawing-room rationalism of Hume and Gibbon, or to content himself with the ecclesiastical placidity known as Moderatism. Much had occurred since the arm-chair philosophers of Edinburgh taught that this was the best possible world, and that the highest wisdom consisted in frowning upon enthusiasm and cultivating the comfortable. The French Revolution had revolutionised men's thoughts and feelings. There had been revealed to man the inadequacy of the old Deistical or Mechanical philosophy, which, spreading from England to France, had done so much to hasten the revolutionary epoch. Carlyle could find no spiritual sustenance in the purely mechanical theory of life which was offered as the substitute for the theory of the Churches. There was another theory, which had its rise in Germany, and to which Carlyle clung when he could no longer keep hold of the Supernatural. In Transcendentalism, Carlyle found salvation.