nd
contrivances by which a number of mean and selfish passions might be
somehow so directed as to balance each other. It is not by any such
devices that society can really be regenerated. You must raise men's
souls, not alter their conventions. They must not simply abolish
kings, but learn to recognize the true king, the man who has the
really divine right of superior strength and wisdom, not the sham
divine right of obsolete tradition. You require not paper rules, but a
new spirit which spontaneously recognizes the voice of God. The true
secret of life must be to him, as to every "mystic," that we should
follow the dictates of the inner light which speaks in different
dialects to all of us.

But this implies a difficulty. Carlyle, spite of his emergence into
"blue ether," was constitutionally gloomy. He was more alive than any
man since Swift to the dark side of human nature. The dullness of
mankind weighed upon him like a nightmare. "Mostly fools" is his pithy
verdict upon the race at large. Nothing then could be more idle than
the dream of the revolutionists that the voice of the people could be
itself the voice of God. From millions of fools you can by no
constitutional machinery extract anything but folly. Where then is the
escape? The millions, he says (essay on Johnson), "roll hither and
thither, whithersoever they are led"; they seem "all sightless and
slavish," with little but "animal instincts." The hope is that, here
and there, are scattered the men of power and of insight, the
heaven-sent leaders; and it is upon loyalty to them and capacity for
recognizing and obeying them that the future of the race really
depends. This was the moral of the lectures on 'Hero-Worship' (1840).
Odin, Mahomet, Dante, Shakespeare, Luther, Cromwell, and Napoleon, are
types of the great men who now and then visit the earth as prophets or
rulers. They are the brilliant centres of light in the midst of the
surrounding darkness; and in loyal recognition of their claims lies
our security for all external progress. By what signs, do you ask, can
they be recognized? There can be no sign. You can see the light if you
have eyes; but no other faculty can supply the want of eyesight. And
hence arise some remarkable points both of difference from and
coincidence with popular beliefs.

In the 'Chartism,' 'Past and Present,' and 'Latter-Day Pamphlets'
(1839, 1843, and 1850), Carlyle applied his theories to the problems
of the day. They had