On the other hand it is
equally certain that no personality is independent of his age and the
backing he finds in it, or the response which he may enlist for his
revolt from it. Both of these are true statements of the case; as to
which is ultimate, that is the old and rather academic question of
whether the oak or the acorn comes first. We repeat that it is
impossible, in this double play of cause and effect, to say which is the
ultimate cause and which the effect. The controversy which was waged in
the nineteenth century between the schools of Buckle and Carlyle is
likely to go on indefinitely through the future. But what concerns us at
present is this, that all paganism which finds expression in a
literature has existed in the age before it found that expression. The
literature is indeed to some extent the creator of the age, but to a far
greater extent it is the expression of the age, whose creation is due to
a vast multiplicity of causes.
Among these causes one of the foremost was political advance and
freedom--the political doctrines, and the beginnings of Socialistic
thought, which had appeared about the time when _Sartor Resartus_ was
written.
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