Had Carlyle confined himself to description of social, industrial, and political diseases, he would have had an unsullied reputation in the sphere of spiritual dynamics, but flaws immediately appeared when he endeavoured to prescribe remedies. Many of his remedies were too vague to be of use; where they were specific, they were so Quixotic as to be useless. His proposals for dealing with labour and pauperism never imposed on any sensible man on this side of cloud-land. CHAPTER IX CARLYLE AS AN INSPIRATIONAL FORCE It is the misfortune of the critic, the historian, and the sociologist to be superseded. In the march of events the specialist is fated to be left behind. The influence of the inspirationalist is ever-enduring. As the present writer has elsewhere said:--Carlyle has been called a prophet. The word in these days has only a vague meaning. Probably Carlyle earned the name in consequence of the oracular and denunciatory elements in his later writings. Then, again, the word prophet has come to be associated with the thought of a foreteller of future events. A prophet in the true sense of the word is not one who foretells the future, but one who revives and keeps alive in the minds of his contemporaries a vivid sense of the great elemental facts of life. Why is it that the Bible attracts to its pages men of all kinds of temperament and all degrees of culture? Because in it, especially in the Psalms, Job, and the writings of Isaiah and his brother prophets, serious people are brought face to face with the great mysteries, God, Nature, Man, Death, etc.--mysteries, however, which only rush in upon the soul of man in full force on special occasions, in hours of lonely meditation, or by the side of an open grave. In the hurly-burly of life the sense of what Carlyle calls the Immensities, Eternities, and Silences, become so weak that even good men have sorrowfully to admit that they live lives of practical materialism. As Arnold puts it: "Each day brings its petty dust Our soon-choked souls to fill, And we forget because we must, And not because we will." The mission of the Hebrew prophet was by passionate utterance to keep alive in the minds of his countrymen a deep, abiding sense of life's mystery, sacredness, and solemnity. What Isaiah did for his day, Carlyle did for the moderns. In the whole range of modern literature, it is impossible to match Carlyle's magnificent passages in _Sartor Resartus_, in which, under a biographical guise, he deals with the great primal emotions, wonder, awe, admiration, love, which form the warp and woof of human life. Nothing can be finer than the following rebuke to those mechanical scientists who imagine that Nature can be measured by tape-lines, and duly labelled in museums:--