Carlyle's practical Ethics, though too little indulgent to the light and play of life, in which he admitted no [Greek: adiaphora] and only the relaxation of a rare genial laugh, are more satisfactory than his conception of their sanction, which is grim. His "Duty" is a categorical imperative, imposed from without by a taskmaster who has "written in flame across the sky, 'Obey, unprofitable servant.'" He saw the infinite above and around, but not _in_ the finite. He insisted on the community of the race, and struck with a bolt any one who said, "Am I my brother's keeper?" All things, the minutest that man does, influence all men, the very look of his face blesses or curses.... It is a mathematical fact that the casting of this pebble from my hand alters the centre of gravity of the universe. But he left a great gulf fixed between man and God, and so failed to attain to the Optimism after which he often strove. He held, with Browning, that "God's in His heaven," but not that "All's right with the world." His view was the Zoroastrian _*athanatos machae*_, "in God's world presided over by the prince of the powers of the air," a "divine infernal universe." The Calvinism of his mother, who said "The world is a lie, but God is truth," landed him in an _impasse_; he could not answer the obvious retort,--Did then God make and love a lie, or make it hating it? There must have been some other power _to eteron_, or, as Mill in his Apologia for _Theism_ puts it, a limit to the assumed Omnipotence. Carlyle, accepting neither alternative, inconsequently halts between them; and his prevailing view of mankind adds to his dilemma. [Footnote: Some one remarked to Friedrich II. that the philanthropist Sulzer said, "Men are by nature good." "Ach, mein lieber Sulzer," ejaculated Fritz, as quoted approvingly by Carlyle, "er Remit nicht diese verdarnmte Basse."] He imposes an "infinite duty on a finite being," as Calvin imposes an infinite punishment for a finite fault. He does not see that mankind sets its hardest tasks to itself; or that, as Emerson declares, "the assertion of our weakness and deficiency is the fine innuendo by which the soul makes its enormous claim." Hence, according to Mazzini, "He stands between the individual and the infinite without hope or guide, and crushes the human being by comparing him with God. From, his lips, so daring, we seem to hear every instant the cry of the Breton mariner, 'My God, protect me; my bark is so small and Thy ocean so vast.'" Similarly, the critic of Browning above referred to concludes of the great prose writer, whom he has called the poet's twin: "He has let loose confusion upon us. He has brought us within sight of the future: he has been our guide in the wilderness; but he died there and was denied the view from Pisgah."