CARLYLE AND THE IDEA BY R. SCHLEYER, M.A. Contents: Part Page I. Infinite Assertorics 1 II. The Tree of Existence 9 Schema of the Idea 13 III. The Fichtean Paradigm 13 IV. An Effectual Idea of Man 25 Summation 30 PART I: INFINITE ASSERTORICS While still an obscure but brilliant essayist studious of the soulful idealism within Germany’s manifold post-Reformation literatures, the great 19th-century Scottish prose artist Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881) clearly identified, seized upon, and later explicitly expounded various basic and complete forms of the Idea, the concealed foundation of all appearances that comprises the fundamental reality of the world. “Our being is made up of Light and Darkness” (“Characteristics” 208), said he, quite in accord with the totalizing schema shown herein. Carlyle took the name “Idea” without hesitation directly from idealism and idealists. Intuition of the Idea reliably guided Carlyle’s deep and world- famous perspicacity as an essayist, biographer, and historian. This arguably became the sole basis of his religious understanding, thus demonstrating in a modern light—however unconsciously—the most effectual Idea of Man in finite-infinite relation. Yet his final stance, widely misunderstood still today, was not below the Consummate Religion but above it. Evidently, Carlyle occupied this position comfortably and did not fear divine retribution (see Part IV). In 1830, Carlyle recognized an overarching, invisible structure within historical understanding that is clearly identical with the totality of the Idea—an unprecedented and little-noticed achievement in intellectual life. Upon full flowering in perpetuity, he speculated,