Carlyle thought of Natural Supernaturalism as a corrective to the errors of
the Enlightenment, as his journal entry for 13 February 1833 shows:That the Supernatural differs not from the Natural is a great truth, which the last century (especially in France) has been engaged in demonstrating. The
Philosophes went far wrong, however, in this, that instead of raising the Natural to the Supernatural, they strove to sink the Supernatural to the Natural. The gist of my whole way of thought is to do not the latter but the
former.His journal entry for 31 March 1833 reiterated his conviction in the importance of this idea:Neither fear thou that this thy great Message (of the Natural
being the Supernatural) will wholly perish unuttered. One way or other it will and shall be uttered[.] Write it down on Paper any way; speak it from thee; so shall thy painful, destitute Existence not have been in vain.Carlyle wrote a piece dated 15 and 16 November 1852, which
James Anthony Froude edited and published as "Spiritual Optics" in his biography of Carlyle. In it, Carlyle wrote of an altogether (totally) new (or hitherto unconceived)
species of divineness, a divineness lying much nearer home than formerly. A divineness that does not come from
Judea from
Olympus,
Asgard,
Mt. Meru; but is in man himself, in the heart of every living man. The old "divineness" Carlyle speaks of is
theism, which he compares to the
Ptolemaic model, while Natural Supernaturalism is compared to the
Copernican model. Just as the Copernican system superseded the Ptolemaic, Natural Supernaturalism represents "a 'revolution' [in 'our spiritual world'] such as never was before, or at least since letters and recorded history existed among us never was." == Influence ==