With equal fearlessness he attacked the cheap optimism based on material prosperity, which brags of the enormous commercial expansion made possible by the invention of machinery; which boasts of the rapid increase in population--so many more million mouths to feed and bodies to clothe, and so much more food and raiment produced--from decade to decade. These facts, he insisted, are not of themselves evidences of progress. Your inventions procure greater comfort, a more exuberant luxury; but do comfort and luxury necessarily build up character?--do they not rather unbuild it? Are your newly bred millions of bodies more than bodies? Take a census of souls, has _their_ number increased? Though your steam-horse carries you fifty miles an hour, have you thereby become more virtuous? Though the lightning bears your messages, have you gained bravery? Of old, your aristocracy were soldiers: is the brewer who rises from his vats to the House of Lords--is any other man owing his promotion to the tradesman’s skill in heaping wealth--more worshipful than they? Let us not say that this amazing industrial expansion may not conduce to the uplifting of character; but let us strenuously affirm that it is of itself no indication of moral progress, and that, if it fail to be accompanied by a corresponding spiritual growth, it will surely lead society by the Byzantine high-road to effeminacy, exhaustion, and death. A different gospel, this, from that which Carlyle’s great rival, Macaulay, was preaching,--Macaulay, who lauded the inventor of a useful machine above all philosophers! Different from the optimism--which gauges by bulk--of the newspapers and the political haranguers! Different, because true! Yet, though it sounded harsh, it stirred consciences,--which smug flatterings and gratulations can never do; and it gave a tremendous impetus to that movement which has come to overshadow all others,--the movement to reconstruct society on a basis, not of privilege, not of bare legality, but of mutual obligations. Any inventory, however brief, of Carlyle’s substance, would be incomplete without some reference to his quarrel with Science. To Science a large part of the best intelligence of our age has been devoted,--a sign of the breaking away of the best minds from the cretinizing quibbles of theology into fields where knowledge can be ascertained. It is a truism that Science has advanced farther in our century than in all preceding time. By what paradox, then, should Carlyle slight its splendid achievements? Was it not because he revolted from the materialistic tendency which he believed to be inseparable from Science, a tendency which predominated a generation ago more than it does to-day? Materialism Carlyle regarded as a Gorgon’s head, the sight of which would inevitably petrify man’s moral nature.