Abstract
It is the same in our material physiology as in our mental; animal life, like spiritual, you find is tacitly regarded as a quality, a susceptibility… and man himself is but a more cunning chemico-mechanical combination, such as in the progress of discovery we may hope to see manufactured at Soho…. Thus runs the high road to Atheism in religion, materialism in philosophy, utility in morals, and flaring, effect-seeking mannerism in Art. (Dalbrook in ‘Wotton Reinfred’, pp. 103–104)
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Notes
For a brief outline of the contemporary political context of ‘Signs of the Times’ which also draws on contemporaneous periodical literature, see, Wendell V. Harris, ‘Interpretative Historicism: “Signs of the Times” and Culture and Anarchy in their Contexts’, Nineteenth Century Literature 44 (1990), 441–464 (pp. 446–454).
Roderick Watson, ‘Carlyle: The World as Text and the Text as Voice’, in The History of Scottish Literature ed. by Cairns Craig and others, 4 vols (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1987–88; repr. 1989), III: ed. by Douglas Gifford, 153–167 (pp. 160–161).
Herbert L. Sussman, Victorians and the Machine: The Literary Response to Technology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1968), p. 20.
Raymond Williams, Culture and Society: 1780–1950 (London: Chatto and Windus, 1958; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), p. 89. Compare, Kaplan, p. 147.
Compare, Sartor Resartus & Selected Prose ed. with introduction by Herbert Sussman (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), p. xii: ‘in the Carlylean symbol the “inward” and “outward” senses interpenetrate; the material phenomenon and the spiritual principle cannot be separated’.
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© 1997 Ralph Jessop
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Jessop, R. (1997). Signs of the Times. In: Carlyle and Scottish Thought. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230371477_8
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