ABSTRACT
In 1843, Thomas Carlyle writes Past and Present with the express purpose of transforming his nation. A contemporary review, for example, critiquing Mr. Carlyle's unpractical quality, asserts that Mr. Carlyle's great power consists in depicting the past, not in reaching forward to the future. While Past and Present does mourn the loss of a privileged past, it also offers a prophetic call for a present that can emerge from the inanition that threatens England. The story of men transformed into apes becomes a monitory tale of the failure to recognize the meaning that emerges in the world. While Stanley T. Williams reads this story as an illustration of the sin of indifference, such indifference, or Ignavia, as Carlyle later calls it, is merely a part of their error more broadly understood. Carlyle's insistent refusal of cant derives from his understanding of the history of linguistic development.
