What are the leading conceptions of the German form of salvation? The answer to this will give the key to _Sartor Resartus_, and to Carlyle's whole mental outlook. In the eyes of thinkers like Carlyle, the great objection to Christianity was the breach it made between the natural and the supernatural. Between them there was a great gulf which could only fitfully and temporarily be bridged by the miraculous. Students who were being inoculated with scientific ideas of law and order, were bewildered by a theory of life which had no organic relation to the great germinal ideas of the day. In their desire to abolish the supernatural, the French thinkers constructed a theory of Nature in which everything, from the movements of solar masses to the movements of the soul, were interpreted in terms of matter. By adopting a mechanical view of the Universe, the French thinkers robbed Nature of much of its charm, and stunted the emotions on the side of wonder and admiration. The world was reduced to a vast machine, man himself being simply a temporary embodiment of material particles in a highly complex and unique form. Instead of being what it was to the Greeks, a temple of beauty, the Universe to the materialist resembled a prison in which the walls gradually closed upon the poor wretch till he was crushed under the ruins. Goethe has left on record the impression made upon him by the materialistic view of life. As he says, 'The materialistic theory, which reduces all things to matter and motion, appeared to me so grey, so Cimmerian, and so dead that we shuddered at it as at a ghost.'