Thomas Carlyle

Of good so­ci­ety Teufels­dröckh ap­pears to have seen little, or has mostly for­got­ten what he saw. He speaks-out with a strange plain­ness; calls many things by their mere dic­tion­ary names.

On the other hand, let us be free to ad­mit, he is the most un­equal writer breath­ing.

Often after some such feat, he will play tru­ant for long pages, and go dawdling and dream­ing, and mum­bling and maun­der­ing the merest com­mon­places, as if he were asleep with eyes open, which in­deed he is.

A man that de­votes his life to learn­ing, shall he not be learned?

For neither in tail­or­ing nor in le­gis­lat­ing does man pro­ceed by mere Ac­ci­dent, but the hand is ever guided on by mys­ter­i­ous op­er­a­tions of the mind.

“But, on the whole,” con­tin­ues our elo­quent Pro­fessor, “Man is a Tool-us­ing An­imal (Handth­i­er­endes thier).

Never­the­less he can use Tools, can de­vise Tools: with these the gran­ite moun­tain melts into light dust be­fore him; he kneads glow­ing iron, as if it were soft paste; seas are his smooth high­way, winds and fire his un­weary­ing steeds.

Man is called a Laugh­ing An­imal: but do not the apes also laugh, or at­tempt to do it; and is the man­li­est man the greatest and of­ten­est laugher?

“Who am I; what is this Me? A Voice, a Mo­tion, an Ap­pear­ance;—some em­bod­ied, visu­al­ised Idea in the Eternal Mind? Co­gito, ergo sum.

What are your Ax­ioms, and Cat­egor­ies, and Sys­tems, and Aphor­isms? Words, words. High Air-castles are cun­ningly built of Words, the Words well bed­ded also in good Lo­gic-mor­tar, wherein, how­ever, no Know­ledge will come to lodge.