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The Carlyle Reader, Selections Ed. by J. Wood
The Carlyle Reader Selections Ed by J Wood Author:Thomas Carlyle General Books publication date: 2009 Original publication date: 1894 Notes: This is a black and white OCR reprint of the original. It has no illustrations and there may be typos or missing text. When you buy the General Books edition of this book you get free trial access to Million-Books.com where you can select from more than a million book... more »s for free. Excerpt: NOTES. (The References are to page and line. Thus 8.2 means page 8 line 2.) "sartor Resartus," as we have it, was written at Craigenputtock, in Dumfriesshire, in 1830-31, and was originally published piecemeal in Frasers Magazine, in 1833. Its subject is the philosophy of clothes, and this being treated as a philosophy of life, there is ingeniously inwoven with it a life of the philosopher. By "clothes " the author means appearances as vestures of otherwise unseen, nay invisible, existences ; and the ground-thought of the book is, that whatever appears anywhere in time is a manifestation and symbol of an everywhere present underlying eternal reality. That is the author's view of the universe, of the All, and man he regards as placed in the centre of it, that he may take home to himself and body forth to others the spirit of it in his own life and thinking. And his great doctrine of morality correspondingly is, that appearances should correspond with realities, and that the sin of sins among men is falsehood, insincerity. Page i. Tenfelsdrockh, the alter ego of the author, is the thinker in re- lation to the spirit of the time, which is such that it rejects him as its servant, and he rejects it as his master. The word means the "outcast of the devil," and the devil is the spirit of the time, which the author and his proto- type here had, God-compelled, risen up in defiance of, and re- fused to serve under. For a time the one as the other tried to serve it, till they discovered the slavery the attempt more and more in- volved them in, when they with one bold effort tor...« less