The owl-eyed calculator in England
The “Body-politic,” without any belief and faith, to trust merely the superficial and visible
IV. The “Torch of Science”
Instead of renouncing science as Cosslett comments in The ‘Scientific Movement’, Carlyle in reality is a defender of the “Torch of Science,” imbuing science with religious meanings and a sacred mission. With the Torch metaphor, Carlyle’s science is inevitably symbiotic with Maier’s religious scientist and God’s Light. Science and religion, in Carlyle’s viewpoint, therefore, are by no means hostile to each other but mutually productive.
Regarding the “Torch of Science” as a sacred tool to carry out the reform mission, Carlyle assumes that, first, science should functionally investigate the interior and the exterior, the invisible and visible, and the metaphysical and the metaphysical and, second, it should also indiscriminately observe not only the grand issues of gravitation or the planetary system but also the trivial objects in the “obscure region” such as “the vestural Tissue.” Carlyle believes that God leaves his divine signature in every corner of the world, even in the slightest and the most negligible area. As long as the thinker sincerely believes and wanders, the divine truth will be
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revealed.
Since the Torch of Science carries religious meanings, investigating powers, and a sacred mission to reform, Carlyle in reality does not intend to ridicule science in the opening of Sartor. To the contrary, the critical and mocking tone in Chapter I of Book First implicitly reveals the impending crisis of his age, a general myopia affected by mechanism among Carlyle’s contemporaries. Sartor hence illustrates a transition of ideas, the ideas of philosophy, science, religion, mechanism, reform, and the ideas of the status and vista of a philosopher.
A Foucauldian analysis reveals that Sartor Resartus as a discursive horizon, exhibits the confrontation of thoughts and departure of ideas: the decline of traditional ethics vs. the rise of the new values in the whole manner of human existence, the gradual loss of the wise philosophical thinker vs. the increase in the calculative pragmatist, and the languishment of pure science vs. the prevalence of mechanical thought. The Torch metaphor exposes the stealthy rupture of the term, science, from religion in the history of Carlyle’s age. Even if Carlyle intends to denote “science” as a term containing reference to both the interior and the exterior worlds, the
widespread usage of the term to signify the aspect of the mechanical has gradually altered the meaning of “science.” Sartor hence marks the transformation of “science”
from its broader sense in the early and middle nineteenth century to a stricter sense in later decades; that is, from the significance of the “state or fact of knowing” (OED) to the synonymy of “Natural and Physical Science,” “restricted to those branches of study that relate to the phenomena of the material universe and their laws” (OED).
The contradictions revealed in Sartor, hence, are not the warfare relations between science and religion, but the confrontations of, and debates over, the issues of philosophy, science, religion, and the nature of the philosopher.
To juxtapose contextual references to the science-religion relations during
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Carlyle’s age and textual references in “Signs of the Times” and “Characteristics”
with Sartor Resartus, this study discovers that the true conundrum of science in Carlyle’s age derives not from the science-religion break, but from the indifferent trampling of the mechanic over the dynamic in all aspects of human existence.
Furthermore, for Carlyle, it is the contemporary obsession with the mechanic, the exterior and the visible that turn science into a blind machine seeing nothing in the daylight. Carlyle, therefore, does not aim to demand the relinquishing of science in Sartor Resartus, but rather, he proposes to propagate the indispensability of spiritual, moral, and religious reforms in all manners of human existence, including in science, in order to push the social progression and the advancement of human civilization.
Carlyle clearly reveals in the opening of Sartor that the “Torch of Science” is the key to realizing the required reforms.
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Chapter Three
“Natural Supernaturalism” Redefined
For Matter, were it never so despicable, is Spirit, the manifestation of Spirit…. The thing Visible, nay the thing Imagined, the thing in any way conceived as Visible, what is it but a Garment, a Clothing of the higher, celestial Invisible, ‘unimaginable, formless, dark with excess of bright’? (SR 49)
“The Philosopher,” says the wisest of this age, “must station himself in the middle”: how true! (SR 50)
I. Introduction
Though calling for a spiritual reform in an age dominated by mechanism and utilitarianism, Carlyle never proposes denying the necessity of matter in the secular world. In Sartor, spirit and matter do not stand as opposites, conflicting with each other. On the contrary, spirit and matter are in a mutually productive relationship:
matter symbolizes the spirit, and the spirit supports matter. Spirit and matter are not two ends of a binary opposition but two sides of the same coin, reciprocally allied.
Visible matter—imaginable and tangible—is by no means “despicable” in Carlyle’s thought, but represents “a Clothing of the higher, celestial Invisible” to symbolize the spiritual and the supernatural, namely, God. Instead of contradicting each other, visible matter in the natural world and the invisible spirit in the supernatural correspond with each other in Sartor Resartus. “Natural supernaturalism” hence should be defined as the material nature symbolizing the invisible supernatural and the spiritual supernatural nurturing visible nature.
In regard to Carlyle’s natural supernaturalism, M. H. Abrams’s “to naturalize
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the supernatural and to humanize the divine” (68) stands as the most prevalent and persuasive explanation. Borrowing from Carlyle’s paradoxical term, “natural supernaturalism,” Abrams identifies in Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature the irreducible religious heredity buried in the themes of individualism and secularization in the revolutionary Romantic writings.
He argues that “the writings of Wordsworth and his English contemporaries reflect[ed]
not only the language and rhythms but also the design, the imagery, and many of the central moral values of the Bible, as well as of Milton, the great poet of Biblical history and prophecy” (32). Hence, even if Wordsworth intended to claim his own
“great Argument” (28) to distinguish his writings from his ancestor’s, namely, Milton’s, in reality “[b]ehind Wordsworth’s program for poetry was Paradise Lost, and behind Paradise Lost were the Holy Scriptures” (32).
Taking Ludwig Wittgenstein’s statement that “We are not contributing
curiosities, but observations” (Abrams 15) as his analytical base, Abrams believes that no one is able to escape from one’s culture and language and hence no one is able to contribute novelty. What one can do is merely to observe and repeat the ancient. He then argues “the fact is that many of the most distinctive and recurrent elements in both the thought and literature of the age had their origin in theological concepts, images, and plot patterns” (65). With such an interpretation, Wordsworth’s
revolutionary “high argument” is but the “assimilation of Biblical and theological elements to secular or pagan frames of reference” (66). The revolutionary spirit of Wordsworth and his contemporaries, in both Germany and England, thus had its root in Christian tradition, because Christianity had been “woven into the fabric of our language, control the articulation of our thinking” (66). “Natural supernaturalism,” in Abrams’s interpretation, therefore stands for “to naturalize the supernatural and to humanize the divine.” His argument is instructive for he reminds radicals that
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Romantic writings are perhaps revolutionary in their form but traditional in their content.
In order to prove the significance of the indispensible religious tie in Romantic writings, Abrams utilizes the metaphor of a “culminating and procreative marriage between mind and nature” as a secularized form of the marriage of God and his redeemed bride on earth in order to stress the theological as well as teleological themes in Romantic writings. He deems that, for instance, Teufelsdrockh’s spiritual renovation in wild nature represents the repeated formula of the Romantic marriage of
“mind and nature.” Abrams’s pattern of analogy is apparent: a: b:: c: d, that is,
God: the redeemed bride on the earth::
mind: nature::
the supernatural: nature
This analogy also implies:
the invisible: the visible::
the religious: the secular::
the spiritual: the material
Under this dualistic analogy, Abrams’ proposition turns out to be obvious: to bring up the significance of the unbreakable “divine” tradition to bind the Romantic revolution.
Though taking the spousal of mind and nature to elaborate his keynote of
“natural supernaturalism,” Abrams’s emphasis however mainly falls on the “mind” as the “supernatural” ends. He shows how the prophet-poet grows spiritually to cross his inward crisis through diverse “circuitous journeys” (Abrams chp3, chp4, chp5). The
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alienated poet at first feels lost in the mundane world and finally regains faith and an integrated self in the paradise on earth. In Abrams’s structure of analysis, the “mind”
as well as “the supernatural” seems to be the protagonist, while the “nature” appears as a backdrop. What is significant resides in the inner world, and the external world is a mere setting that reflects what is working in the prophet-poet’s interior universe.
With such emphasis in his analysis, Abrams thus has a bias in treating the spousal metaphor of mind and nature. He has his eye on mind more than on matter, and simultaneously, he inclines to interpret “the supernatural” more than to elaborate
“nature.”
Hence this study intends to modify Abrams’s by emphasizing the other side, the material, the secular, and the visible, in his dualistic structure of analysis, that is, the
“nature” side in Carlyle’s philosophy of “natural supernaturalism.” If Abrams’s study aims to claim the significance of the theological tradition in Romantic writings, including in Carlyle’s, this study proposes to highlight the significance of the physical world in Carlyle’s writing. To adopt the same idea from Wittgenstein as Abrams does, this study has its analysis founded on the statement that: “We are not contributing curiosities, but observations” as well. Since no one is able to escape from the language and culture in which one dwells, the early nineteenth-century natural
theology that valued the Book of Nature highly might have been woven into Carlyle’s thoughts too. The subject of “nature” under this analytical scheme, then, will no longer play as a foil to the mind but have its own characteristics and attributes in relation to the other subject, “the supernatural.” The visible and the material therefore will no longer function as the specific “form” of the “secularization” in a
revolutionary age but one of the keynotes in Carlyle’s philosophical dialectic.
This chapter hence has two aims. The first aim is to analyze the attribute and function of “matter” in Carlyle’s “Clothes Philosophy.” I opine that Carlyle never
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intended to relinquish “matter” on account of transcendentalism. Rather, matter as well as its mechanic order in the mundane world in Sartor has its own divine significance and spiritual function: matter in Sartor serves as a visible medium to perceive God and a tangible vehicle to accomplish spiritual reform. Similar to Abrams’s, this study also assumes that the text never speaks the novel but repeats what is whispering in the context, and thus Carlyle’s respect for “matter” is not simply his own idiosyncrasy but a reflection of the contemporary ideology of natural
theology. Carlyle’s “natural supernaturalism” therefore can be treated as an aesthetic revision of natural theology, similar to William Paley’s in Natural Theology (1802), and his Clothes Philosophy can be viewed as a metaphorical adaptation of Paley’s
“watch analogy.”
The second aim of this chapter will be the elaboration of Carlyle’s concept of the universe, the “whole.” I assume that Carlyle never perceives a separation between the natural and the spiritual, or the material from the divine; instead, what he
perceives is the rupture between the “subjective” world from the “objective” world in the minds of his contemporary intellectuals. That is to say, without thinking of the use of “matter” as a hindrance to spirit and God, Carlyle in reality deplores the
“subjective” bias of his contemporaries in ignoring the “objective” universe, that is, the “whole” harmoniously integrated matter and spirit, the visible and the invisible, as well as the natural and the supernatural. What Carlyle is criticizing, in Sartor, thus, is not “matter” but his contemporaries, who are blinded to the objective universe (the whole), ignoring the supernatural half, but seeing merely the mechanic half of the whole. He imputes the spiritual crisis in an unhealthy society to the foolish, not to the use of “matter.” Matter, due to its function symbolizing God, should be weighed equally with “spirit.” Matter and spirit correspond to each other; they stand for two poles of “the whole” in Carlyle’s “Clothes Philosophy.”
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To begin with the argument that Carlyle is an aggressive reformer to strengthen the faith in an invisible God based on visible matter in “nature,” this study will firstly start with an adumbration of Carlyle’s early studies, his intimacy with natural
theology, and the importance of “matter” in natural philosophy.
II. Carlyle’s Early Studies and Matter (1) Carlyle’s Early Studies
Before becoming a professional writer, Carlyle was once a student of natural philosophy. Around 1814 and 1815, when entering the University of Edinburgh, Carlyle had taken the required courses for ministerial students. However, just after one year, he abandoned his ministerial studies and turned to the studies of
mathematics, mineralogy, and geology. G. B. Tennyson observes it to be “[l]ess a cause than a consequence of his loss of faith was his preoccupation with natural philosophy” (19). Carlyle’s rejection of ministry, paradoxically, aimed to grasp the truth of God that he found unable to be apprehended from the ministerial studies.
Since Christianity could not solve the perplexed mind of the young Carlyle, science stood as a probable means to offer answers. For the twenty-first-century reader, Carlyle’s transfer from religion to science seems to be an odd gesture; for the
nineteenth-century people, however, his change was but a reasonable choice because natural philosophy, termed as science in the twenty-first century, was “conceived of as the handmaid of religion” (19).
For Carlyle the young scholar, natural philosophy was never a weapon to attack his loyalty to religion but one part of “a synthesis” (Tennyson 20) that hopefully could
“unite in meaningful harmony in the multiplicities of modern life” (20). Natural philosophy in the young Carlyle’s mind, hence, “appeared as a way to bridge the gap [of science and religion], not as a cause of it” (20). Between natural philosophy and
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theology there was not a break: the study of the material world did not mean to deny the research in the spiritual, and the study of the spiritual world did not mean to abandon the recognition of the material world. The young Carlyle in reality held that the material world comprehended the spiritual wisdom and the supernatural world left its symbol in the natural world.
In order to deepen his faith in God, Carlyle chose the knowledge of geology as a channel to explore the divine secret. “Geology was the keystone science of the first half of the nineteenth century” (Tennyson 21), and the Germans were masters in this field. Carlyle thus was not simply interested in German literature but also fascinated with German science, especially with the study of geology. Like his model, Johnna Wofgang von Goethe (1749-1832), who was expert in poetry, theology, as well as optics, the young Carlyle also broadly read writings of religion, literature, and natural philosophy—the sciences such as “Busching’s Geography” (Carlyle SR 62),
Saussure’s chemistry, Cuvier’s zoology, and Playfair’s mathematics.19 Besides his contemporary scientist, “he knew Newton” (Tennyson 21) too. For this voracious young reader, the knowledge in the fields of science, literature, and religion never contradicted to but correlated with one another.
During the years to compose Sartor (1830-31), Carlyle’s relation to natural philosophy was never less than that to literature, religion, and history. In the early nineteenth century, natural philosophy was one of the standard disciplines among English intellectuals, and Carlyle personally attended to this study. In 1834, his profession in natural science even promoted him to “the Chair of Astronomy at
Edinburgh” (Tennyson 23), a position Carlyle considered seriously but finally rejected.
19 According to Tennyson’s research, Carlyle read “Saussure, Cuvier, and Playfair, and he knew Newton” (21). Nicolas-Théodore de Saussure was a Swiss chemist; Baron Georges Léopold Chrétien Frédéric Dagobert Cuvier a French naturalist and zoologist; and and John Playfaire a Scottish scientist.
Playfair was professor of mathematics and professor of natural philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. Illustrations of the Huttonian Theory of the Earth published in 1802 was one of his best known books.
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Carlyle’s endeavor in the physical world, hence, never confused his interest in the metaphysical, and his curiosity to nature never hindered his affection of the
supernatural. He never considered the incompatibility between science and religion, matter and mind, as well as nature and the supernatural, since for “the great majority of British intellectuals, science and theology were mutually informing means of investigating God’s world… [and] its practitioners did not in general recognize that gap [between science and theology] to begin with” states Colin Jager in The Book of God (4). In other words, matter in nature never stood at opposite poles to spirit in the supernatural, and any scientific investigations into the physical substance never aimed to prod Christianity and irritate God. Since there was never a gap between matter and mind, Carlyle was quick to “[make] free use of analogies drawn from natural science like geology to advance arguments” (Tennyson 22). It is thus reasonable that matter corresponded to spirit, and science to religion in the Carlylean universe. “The Torch of Science” in the opening of Sartor, for instance, is one of the typical metaphors to demonstrate Carlyle’s free use of the consonance between matter and spirit as well as science and religion.
For the early nineteenth century, Carlyle was unexceptional in embracing the concept of a harmonious relation between matter and spirit, as well as science and religion. To the contrary, due to the ideology of the design argument rooted in natural philosophy, every educated mind believed in “a felt convergence of religious belief and scientific investigations” (Jager 4). During Carlyle’s age, one of the most
influential and widely read books to theorize natural philosophy was William Paley’s Natural Theology; or, Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity,
Collected from the Appearances of Nature (1802). Though Paley (1743-1805) was not
“the most original or inspiring thinker,” Jager states, “[e]very university-educated
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man would have encountered Paley’s works at least once during his career” (103).20 Not odd, Carlyle read Paley’s Natural Theology. Darwin even praised Paley’s “watch analogy” in one of his 1859 letters: “I don’t think I hardly even admired a book more than Paley’s ‘Natural Theology.’ I could almost formerly have said it by heart” (qtd.
man would have encountered Paley’s works at least once during his career” (103).20 Not odd, Carlyle read Paley’s Natural Theology. Darwin even praised Paley’s “watch analogy” in one of his 1859 letters: “I don’t think I hardly even admired a book more than Paley’s ‘Natural Theology.’ I could almost formerly have said it by heart” (qtd.