John George Robertson on Thomas Carlyle

“Carlyle, unquestionably, was the strongest moral force in the English literature of the nineteenth century... He laughed to scorn the pretensions of scientific materialism to undermine man's faith in the unseen; he heaped obloquy on the much vaunted science of political economy; he championed the spiritual against the material, demanded respect for justice and for the moral law and insisted on the supreme need of reverence—reverence, as Goethe had taught him, not merely for what is above us, but, also, for what is on the earth, beside us and beneath us.”

“He saw human life and earthly happenings against a vast background of mystic spiritualism, of eternities and immensities; he was an individualist, to whom the development of the race depends on great personal virtues, on heroic abnegation and self-sacrificing activity. His rugged independence made it difficult for his contemporaries to 'place' him; he resolutely refused to be labelled, or to be identified with any specific intellectual, literary or political creed.”