Thomas carlyle brief biography of mahatma

Thomas Carlyle , the essayist, historian, and philosopher of culture, was born in Ecclefechan, Scotland, the eldest son of a stern, puritanical stonemason.

Thomas carlyle biography pdf

There can be little doubt that the often-hysterical extravagances of Carlyle's later social doctrines had a direct emotional origin in the Calvinism of his childhood. In he became a divinity student at Edinburgh University, but he soon stopped attending the university courses and read widely on his own in modern literature. After leaving Edinburgh in , he taught school, at the same time broadening his already impressive span of reading.

A reading of Edward Gibbon in immediately precipitated Carlyle's rejection of the Bible as a historical record and gave impetus to his growing interest in history and social institutions. Convinced that he could never become a minister, he returned to Edinburgh in and began his literary career as a freelance journalist. The next three years were the most miserable in a generally agonized life.

He was unknown; he was socially, ideologically, even stylistically antipathetic to the fashionable literary world. He was also very poor, desperately lonely, and because of his irregular eating habits, almost permanently dyspeptic. Religious doubts quickly darkened into unbelief, and in he experienced the spiritual crisis later hieroglyphically recorded in Sartor Resartus — Conviction is worthless until it is converted into activity, mere speculation being "endless, formless, a vortex amid vortices.

Soon Carlyle found a role in which his genuine talents could emerge.