But what Naturalism fails to do, Idealism or Transcendentalism promises to perform. Idealism is simply Materialism turned upside down. The only difference between the evolution of Spencer and of Hegel is that the one puts matter, the other mind, first. For all practical purposes, it signifies little whether mind is the temporary embodiment of an idea, or the temporary product of a highly specialised form of matter. In either case, man has no more freedom than the bubble upon the surface of the stream. We may discourse of the bubble as poetically or as practically as we please, the result is the same--absorption in the universal. Hegelianism as much as Naturalism leaves man a prisoner in the hands of Fate. The only difference is, that while Naturalism puts round the prisoner's neck a plain, unpretentious noose, Hegelianism adds fringes and embroidery. If there is no appeal from Nature's dread sentence, the less poetry and embroidery there is about the doleful business the better. In _Sartor Resartus_, Carlyle talks finely but vaguely, of the peace which came over his soul when he discovered that the universe was not mechanical but Divine. The peace was not of long duration. What consolation Carlyle derived from Idealism did not appear in his life. What a contrast between the poetic optimism of _Sartor_ and the heavily-charged pessimism of old age, when Carlyle, with wailing pathos, exclaims that God does nothing. Carlyle's life abundantly illustrates the fact that whenever it leaves cloudland, Idealism sinks into scepticism more bitter and gloomy than the unbelief of Naturalism. Carlyle approached the question of the Ultimate Reality from the wrong standpoint. He had no reasoned philosophic creed. A poet, he had the poetic dread of analysis, and his spirit revolted at the spectacle of Nature on the dissecting-table. He waged a life-long warfare against science. As the present writer has elsewhere remarked:--'Carlyle never could tolerate the evolution theory. He always spoke with the utmost contempt of Darwin, and everything pertaining to the development doctrines. It is somewhat startling to find that Carlyle was an evolutionist without knowing it. The antagonism between Carlyle and Spencer disappears on closer inspection. When Carlyle speaks of the universe as in very truth the star-domed city of God, and reminds us that through every crystal and through every grass blade, but most through every living soul, the glory of a present God still beams, he is simply saying in the language of poetry what Spencer says in the language of science, that the world of phenomena is sustained and energised by an infinite Eternal Power. Evolution is as emphatic as Carlyle on the absolute distinction between right and wrong. Carlyle and all the German school confront the evolutionary ethics with the Kantian categorical imperative. Surely the Evolutionists in the matter of an imperative out-rival the Intuitionalists, when, in addition to the