" How far away
we are from all this with our mammon-worship and our fantastic social
unrealities, every student of our times must know, or at least must have
often heard. He would not have heard it so often, however, had not
Thomas Carlyle cried it out with that harsh voice of his, in this and
many others of his books. It was his gunpowder, more than any other
explosive of the nineteenth century, that broke up the immense
complacency into which half England always tends to relapse.
He is not hopeless of the future of society. Society is the true
Phoenix, ever repeating the miracle of its resurrection from the ashes
of the former fire. There are indestructible elements in the race of
man--"organic filaments" he calls them--which bind society together, and
which ensure a future for the race after any past, however lamentable.
Those "organic filaments" are Carlyle's idea of Social Reality--the real
things which survive all revolution. There are four such realities which
ensure the future for society even when it seems extinct.
First, there is the fact of man's brotherhood to man--a fact quite
independent of man's willingness to acknowledge that brotherhood.
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