It is astonishing, again, how
constantly one hears rationalists arguing upon some deep topic,
apparently without troubling about the deep assumptions involved, having
lost their sense, as it were, of the real colour and character of a
man's assumption. For instance, two men will argue about whether
patriotism is a good thing and never discover until the end, if at all,
that the cosmopolitan is basing his whole case upon the idea that man
should, if he can, become as God, with equal sympathies and no
prejudices, while the nationalist denies any such duty at the very
start, and regards man as an animal who has preferences, as a bird has
feathers.
* * * * *
Thus it was with Carlyle: he startled men by attacking not arguments,
but assumptions. He simply brushed aside all the matters which the men
of the nineteenth century held to be incontrovertible, and appealed
directly to the very different class of matters which they knew to be
true. He induced men to study less the truth of their reasoning, and
more the truth of the assumptions upon which they reasoned. Even where
his view was not the highest truth, it was always a refreshing and
beneficent heresy. He denied every one of the postulates upon which the
age of reason based itself. He denied the theory of progress which
assumed that we must be better off than the people of the twelfth
century. Whether we were better than the people of the twelfth century,
according to him, depended entirely upon whether we chose or deserved to
be.
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