But the attempts to discredit Carlyle’s religious sentiment must absolutely fall to the ground.  The profound security of Carlyle’s sense of the unity of the Cosmos is like that of a Hebrew prophet; and it has the same expression that it had in the Hebrew prophets—­humour.  A man must be very full of faith to jest about his divinity.  No Neo-Pagan delicately suggesting a revival of Dionysus, no vague, half-converted Theosophist groping towards a recognition of Buddha, would ever think of cracking jokes on the matter.  But to the Hebrew prophets their religion was so solid a thing, like a mountain or a mammoth, that the irony of its contact with trivial and fleeting matters struck them like a blow.  So it was with Carlyle.  His supreme contribution, both to philosophy and literature, was his sense of the sarcasm of eternity.  Other writers had seen the hope or the terror of the heavens, he alone saw the humour of them.  Other writers had seen that there could be something elemental and eternal in a song or statute, he alone saw that there could be something elemental and eternal in a joke.  No one who ever read it will forget the passage, full of dark and agnostic gratification, in which he narrates that some Court chronicler described Louis XV. as “falling asleep in the Lord.”  “Enough for us that he did fall asleep; that, curtained in thick night, under what keeping we ask not, he at least will never, through unending ages, insult the face of the sun any more ... and we go on, if not to better forms of beastliness, at least to fresher ones.”

The supreme value of Carlyle to English literature was that he was the founder of modern irrationalism; a movement fully as important as modern rationalism.  A great deal is said in these days about the value or valuelessness of logic.  In the main, indeed, logic is not a productive tool so much as a weapon of defence.  A man building up an intellectual system has to build like Nehemiah, with the sword in one hand and the trowel in the other.  The imagination, the constructive quality, is the trowel, and argument is the sword.  A wide experience of actual intellectual affairs will lead most people to the conclusion that logic is mainly valuable as a weapon wherewith to exterminate logicians.

But though this may be true enough in practice, it scarcely clears up the position of logic in human affairs.  Logic is a machine of the mind, and if it is used honestly it ought to bring out an honest conclusion.  When people say that you can prove anything by logic, they are not using words in a fair sense.  What they mean is that you can prove anything by bad logic.  Deep in the mystic ingratitude of the soul of man there is an extraordinary tendency to use the name for an organ, when what is meant is the abuse or decay of that organ.  Thus we speak of a man suffering from “nerves,” which is about as sensible as talking about a man suffering from ten fingers.  We speak of “liver” and “digestion” when we mean the failure of liver and the absence of digestion.  And in the same manner we speak of the dangers of logic, when what we really mean is the danger of fallacy.