Carlyle is deeper and somewhat
different. The fault of the great mass of logicians is not that they
bring out a false result, or, in other words, are not logicians at all.
Their fault is that by an inevitable psychological habit they tend to
forget that there are two parts of a logical process--the first the
choosing of an assumption, and the second the arguing upon it; and
humanity, if it devotes itself too persistently to the study of sound
reasoning, has a certain tendency to lose the faculty of sound
assumption. It is astonishing how constantly one may hear from rational
and even rationalistic persons such a phrase as 'He did not prove the
very thing with which he started,' or 'The whole of his case rested upon
a pure assumption,' two peculiarities which may be found by the curious
in the works of Euclid. 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.

He denied every type and species of prop or association or support which
threw the responsibility upon c