Hamlet and The Tempest," but Milton is "more conscious of his faculty, which accordingly is an inferior one." Byron proclaims the critic the equal of the poet; reviewing spreads with such "strange vigour" that it becomes necessary to publish a Review of Reviews; and "all Literature has become one boundless self-devouring Review." Not only literature but every form of expression, knowledge, and work has surrounded itself with commentary and criticism; the creative impulse, smothered by "metaphysical" speculation, runs out of breath. "Never since the beginning of Time was there ... so intensely self-conscious a society." Everything is "probed into"—"anatomically studied, that it may be medically aided."

The trouble lies in the very developments usually taken as evidence of progress. The advance of intellect is highly desirable, but it will not go very far if it looks constantly backward to admire the distance already traveled. "What ... is all this that we hear, for the last generation or two, about the Improvement of the Age, the Spirit of the Age, Destruction of Prejudice, Progress of the Species, and the March of Intellect, but an unhealthy state of self-sentience, self-survey; the precursor and prognostic of still worse health?" The more loudly the nineteenth century congratulates itself on its superiority to earlier ages, the more it invites the suspicion of moral and intellectual decay.

In "Signs of the Times," Carlyle called the nineteenth century a "Mechanical Age." In "Characteristics," he adds the seemingly contradictory observation that it also deserves to be called the "Age of Metaphysics." But mechanism and metaphysics are two symptoms of the same malady. When thought becomes too conscious of itself, it loses contact with "vital action" and drifts off into airy, increasingly self-referential abstractions. German idealism and British utilitarianism, the latter with its "cunning mechanising of self-interests, and all conceivable adjustments of checking and balancing," exemplify the split between action and inquiry. The "whole man, heaven-inspired," recedes from view, and partial men stand in his place, incapacitated alike for intelligent action and for original thought. "Virtue, properly so called, has ceased to be practised" and gives way to "benevolence." Only the "outward Mechanism" of man's "self‐ impulse ... remains acknowledged: of Volition, except as the synonym of Desire, we hear nothing; of 'Motives,' without any Mover, more than enough."

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