Vicissitudes of Idealism.—At the beginning of the last chapter we noticed the early collapse of idealism in Germany. But the prophets of Romanticism, when they were no longer honoured at home, found an hospitable reception elsewhere, and especially in England. Indeed, even before the prestige of idealism had begun to decline in Germany, Englishmen had been introduced to it by the writings and translations of S. T. Coleridge (1772-1834) and Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881). These two popularisers of German ideas were littérateurs rather than professional philosophers, but for that very reason their vogue and influence were the wider.
Coleridge.—Coleridge was in spirit a genuine Romanticist; being, as were some of the most notable of the German school—e.g., Goethe and Schiller—a poet as well as a philosopher. In his Biographia Literaria he has left behind the story of his intellectual and spiritual development. He acknowledges his debt to Kant, to the Romanticists, and in particular to Schelling, whose "intuitionism" was naturally congenial to him. Coleridge was never able to embody his philosophical creed in any single work; he does not seem to have possessed the necessary power of application. He was unfortunate in being a man of weak character, and his ineffectiveness struck his contemporaries. But in spite of these disadvantages—his sentimentality, the lack of clearness of his thought, his weakness for opium—he certainly exercised an important influence, especially in the realm of theology. His ideas, though vague, were calculated to awaken the speculative habit, and, introduced as they were, to a wide circle, were fruitful and stimulating. English theology had been, in the eighteenth century, of an arid kind, and the English philosophical tradition lacked, for the most part, appreciation of those deeper aspects of reality which had appealed to German thinkers. Coleridge, by introducing German speculation to his countrymen, was able "to free theology of some of its narrowness, and to deepen and enlarge the spiritual outlook of his age."[48]
Thomas Carlyle.—Carlyle was a man of a very different temper, whose attitude towards Coleridge was "half contemptuous, half compassionate." A typically Carlylean characterisation of him may be found in the Life of Sterling:
"He was thought to hold—he alone in England—the key of German and other Transcendentalisms.... A sublime man, who alone in those dark days escaped from black materialisms and revolutionary deluges with God, Freedom, Immortality, still his. The practical intellects of the world did not much heed him, or carelessly reckoned him a metaphysical dreamer; but to the rising spirits of the young generation he sat there as a kind of Magus, girt in mystery and enigma...."
"The good man ... gave you the idea of a life that had been full of sufferings ... the deep eyes, of a light hazel, were as full of sorrow as inspiration; confused pain looked mildly from them, as in a kind of mild astonishment. The whole figure and air, good and amiable otherwise, might be called flabby and irresolute; expressive of weakness under possibility of strength.... He spoke as if preaching—preaching earnestly and hopelessly the weightiest things."
Carlyle himself had all the character and industry that Coleridge lacked, and it was another side of German idealism that had appealed to him. The Scotchman was of the same fibre and stock as that other half-Scotchman, Kant. Here was the source from which he had drawn his inspiration. We see in Carlyle the same moral earnestness, the same "toughness" of thought, the same absence of "sentimental moonshine." From Kant, too, he derives a vigorous independence of thought, a religious respect for individuality, a horror of shams and affectation. Kant was a true child of the Reformation, and Carlyle is a genuine disciple.
In a single important respect, however, he differed from (and improved upon) his master. Kant lacked, or at least did not display, the saving grace of humour; in Carlyle this quality looks out from every page—keen, satirical, sometimes bitter, sometimes grotesque; he ridiculed his own generation, its vices, its prejudices, its superstitions.
Sartor Resartus.—For our purpose, Sartor Resartus—that profound and humorous book—is Carlyle's masterpiece: here all the characteristic Kantian doctrines may be found.
The "philosophy of clothes"—which is the quaint title behind which Kantian idealism is made to masquerade—starts from the thought that just as an acquaintance with his clothes will not reveal to us the man, so an acquaintance with phenomena (which is all that science can claim to give us) cannot reveal to us the real ground of existence, which remains an inscrutable mystery. We must "look on clothes till they become transparent," if we could understand reality.
"To the eye of vulgar Logic what is man? An omnivorous biped that wears breeches. To the eye of pure Reason what is he? A Soul, a Spirit, and divine Apparition."