cial ancestry in the ape. Some transcendental realists do get over the difficulty; hut Carlyle never could. In June, 1868, he wrote in his journal as follows:
"'Surely the speed with which matters are going on in this supreme province of our affairs is something notable and sadly undeniable in late years. . . . "All descended from gorillas, seemingly." "Sun made by collision of huge masses of planets, asteroids, etc., in the infinite of space." Very possibly, say I. "Then where is the place for a Creator?" The fool hath said in his heart there is no God. From the beginning it has been so, is now, and to the end will be so. The fool hath said it—be and nobody else; and with dismal results in our days—as in all days; which often makes me sad to think of, coming nearer myself and the end of my life than I ever expected they would do. That of the sun, and his possibly being made in that manner, seemed to me a real triumph of science, indefinitely widening the horizon of our theological ideas withal, and awakened a good many thoughts in me when I first heard of it, and gradually perceived that there was actual scientific basis for it—I suppose the finest stroke that "Science," poor creature, has or may have succeeded in making during my time: welcome to me if it be a truth, honorably welcome! But what has it to do with the existence of the Eternal Unnamable?'
"The speculation as to the genesis of the sun and the probable duration of his heat here adverted to by Carlyle with such recognition of its real importance came before him first, I believe, in the form of a paper by Sir William Thomson, of Glasgow, which I had myself the honor of inserting in 'Macmillan's Magazine.' He was much struck with the paper at the time, and often mentioned it to me afterward. It is characteristic that he should have had less objection to this speculation, assigning a definite beginning to the whole solar system, and pointing perhaps to its ultimate collapse and the cessation of all terrestrial life, humanity included, with the extinction of the sun's heat, than to the nearer scientific speculation as to the evolution of species on the earth itself and man's descent from the gorilla. It is as if he found the imagination of a wholesale crash, whether of formation or of annihilation, in the far-back vast of physical immensity, or the far future vast of the same, more cleanly, and therefore more endurable, than any imagination of a materialistic derivation of the human organism, through the ape and what not, from earthly protoplasmic slime. On the whole, one may say that he lived too late to be able to accept the modern scientific doctrine of evolution and work it into bis philosophy, and remained therefore at the last a transcendental realist of the old school. Or perhaps, with the foregoing passage to enlighten us, it might be fairer to say that, whatever conceptions of a cosmic evolution science might bring in, he found them irrelevant to the main matter, and did not care a rush about them in comparison with the
