And so with Nature; to science it is a mechanism, to the understanding heart it is "the living garment of God."
"It is written, the Heavens and the Earth shall fade away like a Vesture; which indeed they are: the Time-Vesture of the Eternal.... The whole External Universe and what it holds is but Clothing...."
The visible world is but a symbol of a profound and awful reality; and all Nature's products, in their degree, symbols as well: but of these, man is the highest. "The true Shekinah is Man: where else is the God's Presence manifested, not to our eyes only, but to our hearts, as in our fellow-man?"
This leads up to the essential doctrine of the Kantian system: that man is a creature of two worlds, who has a foot in either; hence in the phenomenal world he can never find satisfaction.
"Man's Unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his Greatness; it is because there is an infinite in him, which, with all his cunning, he cannot quite bury under the Finite. Will the whole Finance Ministers and Upholsterers and Confectioners of modern Europe undertake, in jointstock company, to make one Shoeblack Happy? They cannot accomplish it, above an hour or two, for the Shoeblack also has a Soul quite other than his Stomach...."
"There is in man a Higher than Love of happiness: he can do without happiness and instead thereof find Blessedness! has it not been to preach forth this same Higher that sages and martyrs ... have spoken and suffered; bearing testimony to the God-like that is in man?"
Carlyle's Influence.—In spite of Carlyle's strange literary mannerisms and his grotesquely Germanic phrases, his writings had great attractiveness for those of his contemporaries who felt themselves smothered by the materialism and utilitarianism of early Victorian England. He was able to re-vitalise idealism amongst them. Moreover he appealed strongly to those to whom the Coleridgean speculations were uncongenial. The strongly developed moral element, both in his writings and in his own somewhat stern and austere personality—what Taine called his "puritanism"—appealed strongly to a certain side of English feeling. His countrymen felt that his was a native genius that they could understand. In fact we may say that the influence of Carlyle, especially among the young and generous minded, has been incalculable in extent and invaluable in quality. Spiritual life in England stands under a deep obligation to him.
Romanticism at Oxford.—Englishmen were thus not entire strangers to German idealism, which had possessed its interpreters in the earlier half of the nineteenth century. Not, however, until it had experienced a decline in Germany (a reaction which occupied our attention in the last chapter), did Romanticism become naturalised in England by being adopted in academic circles.
Among the most notable of English idealists was T. H. Green—fellow and tutor of Balliol College, Oxford. In this thinker we have a widely different type of mind from that of either Coleridge or Carlyle. He was a thinker rather than a poet or a prophet, and he belonged to what we have noticed as the intellectualist—i.e. Hegelian—wing of Romanticism.
Green's chief work was his Prolegomena to Ethics (published posthumously in 1883), where arguments, which were familiar to those acquainted with Hegel, presented themselves. Green begins with an analysis of experience, and leads to the conclusion that Nature—if by it we mean "the connected order of experience"—implies "something other than itself, as the condition of its being what it is." And "of that 'something' we are entitled to say, positively, that it is a self-distinguishing consciousness" (section 52).