Carlyle's insistence that "nothing is lost"—that the "sum-total of the whole Past" lives on in the present—sharply distinguishes his sense of the past from the pastoral tradition, with its wistful evocation of a lost past, and from the sociological tradition that elaborated pastoralism into a contrast between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft—between the organic unity of simpler societies in the past and modern fragmentation. Carlyle exalts memory over custom. History, as he conceives it, represents the triumph of heroism (suitably commemorated and thus continually renewed) over convention. For this reason, it is misleading to interpret Carlyle, as Raymond Williams interprets him, as Burke's successor in an intellectual tradition that criticized modern society by playing it off against the contrasting concept of culture. For Carlyle, culture is the cloak of custom that makes the world seem familiar and thus stifles the capacity for wonder. His understanding of history as the record of glory and "virtue" is closer to republicanism than to the tradition of Burke, Ruskin, and Continental sociology. It is even closer to a Protestant tradition in which "virtue" referred preeminently to the life-giving powers of the creator, which humans approximate only to the extent that they recognize their source. Carlyle's affirmation of human freedom is balanced by an acknowledgment of our dependence on higher powers. The acknowledgment of this dependence—the fullest meaning of what Carlyle means by "wonder"— becomes for this heir of Calvin and John Knox precisely the condition of man's freedom. The illusion of self-sufficiency, on the other hand, stands in the way of genuine insight and the heroic actions that issue from it. In the modern world, this illusion finds its characteristic expression in the machines by means of which mankind seeks to liberate itself from toil— that is, from the inescapable constraints of human existence.

Carlyle is a "prophet," as many commentators have noted; but the usefulness of this description does not lie in its reference to his oracular manner, to the more portentous features of his literary style, or even to his self-conscious conception of himself as a prophet. He was at his least persuasive when he self-consciously adopted the prophetic stance, for reasons he himself explained when he contrasted the poet's unconscious

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