Carlyle was born in a village in Scotland in the year 1795 and died in London. He lived a long industrious life devoted to literature, reading, scholarship and writing.
Carlyle had a humble origin. Carlyle was Scottish.
Here in my small circle of writer’s friends, it is common to confuse the Scots and the English. In a general and casual way I say that Scots are intellectuals and English are bullies. Nevertheless they are political unified.
Carlyle was an atheist; he did not believe in G-d. He became hunted by the idea that man can be saved through work. He thought that anything aesthetic or intellectual man did was despicable and ephemeral. But he believed that the fact of working, the fact of doing something, even if that thing was despicable, was not despicable.
Carlyle take the idea that this world is merely apparent, and gives it a moral and political meaning. He said that just as we see a green tree, we could see it as blue if our visual organs were different, and in the same way, when we touch it we feel it as convex, we could feel it as concave if our hands were made differently.
From A course on English Literature of Professor Jorge Luis Borges.