Carlyle's impatience with reasoning and his determination to follow the promptings of _a priori_ conceptions gave his system of ethics a one-sided cast, and made him needlessly aggressive towards what in his day was called Utilitarianism, but what has now come to be known as Evolutionary Ethics. What is the chief end of man considered as a moral agent? The answer of the Christian religion is as intelligible as it is comprehensive. Man's duty consists in obeying the laws of God revealed in Nature and in the Bible. But apart from revelation, where is the basis of ethical authority? Debarred from accepting the Christian view, and instinctively repelled from Utilitarianism, Carlyle found refuge in the Fichtean and similar systems of ethics. By substituting Blessedness for Happiness as the aim of ethical endeavour, Carlyle endeavoured to preserve the heroic attitude which was associated with Supernaturalism. In his view, it was more consistent with human dignity to trust for inspiration to a light within than painfully to piece together fragments of human experience and ponder the inferences to be drawn therefrom. In his 'Data of Ethics,' Herbert Spencer shows the hollowness of Carlyle's distinction between Blessedness and Happiness. As Spencer puts it: 'Obviously the implication is that Blessedness is not a kind of Happiness, and this implication at once suggests the question, What mode of feeling is this? If it is a state of consciousness at all, it is necessarily one of three states--painful, indifferent, or pleasurable.... If the pleasurable states are in excess, then the blessed life can be distinguished from any other pleasurable life only by the relative amount or the quality of its pleasures. It is a life which makes happiness of a certain kind and degree its end, and the assumption that blessedness is not a form of happiness lapses.... In brief, blessedness has for its necessary condition of existence increased happiness, positive or negative in some consciousness or other; and disappears utterly if we assume that the actions called blessed are known to cause decrease of happiness in others as well as in the actor.'