CARLYLE AND SCOTTISH THOUGHT This page intentionally left blank Carlyle and Scottish Thought Ralph Jessop Lecturer in Philosophy and English Literature University of Glasgow First published in Great Britain 1997 by MACMILLAN PRESS LTD Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and London Companies and representatives throughout the world A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN 978-1-349-39453-1 ISBN 978-0-230-37147-7 (eBook) DOI 10.1057/9780230371477 First published in the United States of America 1997 by ST. MARTIN'S PRESS, INC., Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010 ISBN 978-0-312-17287-9 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Jessop, Ralph, 1957- Carlyle and Scottish thought I Ralph Jessop. p. em. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-312-17287-9 (cloth) I. Carlyle, Thomas, 1795-1881-Philosophy. 2. Scotland­ -Intellectual life-19th century. 3. Philosophy, Scottish-19th century. I. Title. PR4437 .P5J47 1997 824'.8-dc2l 96--44508 CIP ©Ralph Jessop 1997 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1997 978-0-333-63428-8 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London WIP 9HE. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 I 06 05 04 03 02 01 00 99 98 97 For Sharon This page intentionally left blank Contents Preface X List of Abbreviations xviii 1 Introduction 1 2 Categorizing Carlyle - Literature or Philosophy? 15 3 A Common Fund of Philosophic Prose 27 4 The Theory of Ideas: Hume - Reid - Hamilton 55 5 Common Sense: Principles- Perception- Nescience 75 6 Carlyle's 'Wotton Reinfred' 110 7 Scotch Philosophy in Carlyle's Essays 123 8 'Signs of the Times' 142 9 Sartor Resartus 155 10 Conclusion 196 Notes 206 Works Cited 246 Index 259 vii This page intentionally left blank Thought, in such a country [as Scotland], may change its form, but cannot go out .... It may take many forms: the form of hard-fisted money-getting industry, as in the vulgar Scotchman, in the vulgar New Englander; but as compact developed force and alertness of faculty, it is still there; it may utter itself one day as the colossal Scepticism of a Hume (beneficient this too though painful, wrestling Titan-like through doubt and inquiry towards new belief); and again, some better day, it may utter itself as the inspired Melody of a Bums: in a word, it is there, and continues to manifest itself, in the Voice and the Work of a Nation of hardy endeavouring considering men, with whatever that may bear in it, or unfold from it. (Carlyle, 'Sir Walter Scott', CME, 4: 43) ix Preface This book attempts to mark the beginning of a long overdue reas­ sessment of Carlyle's works within a Scottish intellectual context. The title should immediately suggest to Carlyle scholars that I am aiming to respond to Charles Frederick Harrold's seminal study, Carlyle and German Thought. However, I am more concerned with providing a complement to his work than a critique and replace­ ment of it. In addition to providing a study of Carlyle, I shall also examine some crucial features of Scottish thought as articulated both by David Hume and by the Scottish response to Hume's sceptical metaphysics, Thomas Reid's philosophy of Common Sense. The first major limitation that I have placed on the area of study is to confine scrutiny of Carlyle's texts mainly to those written up to 1834. I do not want to imply that the Scottish philosophical dimension of his works abruptly ended in that year or that his works after that time took a wholly different course. Certainly his attention did turn more surely towards historiography, biography and social criticism. But as the fictive or imaginary reworking of fact, present in his work before Sartor Resartus, remained in his later works such as The French Revolution and Past and Present, his inter­ est in history was evident in his earliest writings for Brewster's Encyclopcrdia. Carlyle's move to London in 1834 heralded the emer­ gence of his literary fame and influence as he first began to make his mark on the dawning Victorian age with the publication of The French Revolution in 1837. Although there are undoubtedly conti­ nuities and developments in his writing after 1834, the student of Carlyle's works seems to embark on a different study after this time which involves greater attention to the social, political and historical conditions of the age. But such excuses and justifications aside, the date of 1834 is ultimately fairly arbitrary though it fol­ lows at least one of several good precedents for this demarcation in the work of Harrold. Chris Vanden Bossche is correct when he argues that studies of Carlyle should now attempt to encompass all of his career and not simply end with or focus almost entirely on Sartor Resartus. Had this book been solely devoted to Carlyle I would have followed his example.1 In the hope that what I have X Preface xi discarded or ignored may prompt later research I have tried to keep other conscious limitations similarly obvious. Tracing influences is and ought always to be a difficult task which goes beyond any mere textual comparison and cataloguing of verbal and other similarities. Some of the complicating features in attempting to trace the Scottish philosophical influences on Carlyle need to be mentioned at the outset. Given his undoubted and extensive interest in German writers, the question of the extent to which they were themselves influenced by Scottish philosophers including Hume and Reid complicates any attempt to read Carly­ le's works as influenced by a Scottish philosophical tradition. Immanuel Kant's debts to Scottish Common-Sense philosophy, along with those of several other German philosophers, have recently been studied by Manfred Kuehn.2 However, even in the early decades of the nineteenth century in Scotland there seems to have been an awareness that Kant, who famously declared that Hume had first awakened him from his dogmatic slumbers, owed much to another philosophical tradition and another response to Hume made by the Scottish school of Common Sense as instituted by Hume's first major critic, Thomas Reid.3 Dugald Stewart's hos­ tility to Kant even included the charge that he had virtually plagi­ arized Reid.4 And Sir William Hamilton, who was much more thoroughly conversant with Kant, made his own terse remarks in the 1830s on, for example, Kant's indebtedness to Reid's notions of space.5 Thomas Chalmers also saw similarities between Reid and the Sage of Konigsberg. 6 But if Scottish influences on German writers and thinkers make problematic any study of the direct Scottish influences on Carlyle's work then, mutatis mutandis the same must be true of German influences on Carlyle. It is to be hoped that future studies of the German dimension of his works will bear this in mind and pay attention to the possibility of Scot­ tish sources. TracLng Scottish philosophical influences is also made particu­ larly difficult due to the very extent to which Carlyle's immediate intellectual milieu was saturated in the thought and philosophical concerns bequeathed to them by the dual driving energies of the Scottish Enlightenment, Hume and Reid. All educated people in Scotland in Carlyle's day were to some degree familiar with the metaphysical debate concerning Hume's scepticism. In his Disserta­ tion, Dugald Stewart claimed that 'all well-educated persons may be presumed to have acquired' a 'general acquaintance with xii Preface Mr Hume's Theory of Causation'- a theory at the heart of Hume's sceptical metaphysics? He used this claim as an excuse for not outlining what was generally known about the question. But although one might expect such omissions to recur without formal announcement elsewhere in the literature of the period, one must be wary of inferring from a mere silence some conspiratorial sub­ terfuge or an explicit influence. During Carlyle's student years and, perhaps even more so, during the late 1820s and early 1830s as Hamilton began to reinstate the importance of Reid's philosophy as a successful answer to Hume's scepticism, the philosophical issues articulated by Hume and Reid were so much in the air that Carlyle can hardly have failed to breathe in some of this heady ether. But to hypostatize such a vague claim as the basis of a study of Carlyle in connection with Scottish philosophy, would be to rely upon an assumption which the discipline of academic writing properly excludes. I therefore provide a certain amount of argument to substantiate my claim that in some crucial respects Carlyle was influenced by Scottish thought as written in the philosophical dis­ courses of chiefly Hume, Reid and Hamilton. Thus I draw parallels, indicate allusions, suggest borrowings, highlight passages and elu­ cidate certain strands of thought as one needs to do in attempting to establish specific claims concerning influence.