This brought with it a
characteristic defiance of untoward outer circumstances which gave him
strength and resolution. "Perhaps," he says, "I directly thereupon began
to be a man."
Carlyle believes that the world and everything in it is the expression
of one great indivisible Force; that nothing is separate, nothing is
dead or lost, but that all "is borne forward on the bottomless shoreless
flood of Action, and lives through perpetual metamorphoses." Everything
in the world is an embodiment of this great Force, this "Divine Idea,"
hence everything is important and charged with meaning. "Rightly viewed
no meanest object is insignificant; all objects are as windows, through
which the philosophic eye looks into Infinitude itself."[50]
The universe is thus the "living visible garment of God," and "matter
exists only spiritually," "to represent some Idea, and _body_ it forth."
We, each of us, are therefore one expression of this central spirit, the
only abiding Reality; and so, in turn, everything we know and see is but
an envelope or clothing encasing something more vital which is invisible
within. Just as books are the most miraculous things men can make,
because a book "is the _purest_ embodiment a Thought of man can have,"
so great men are the highest embodiment of Divine Thought visible to us
here.
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