Carlyle's name for the spirit of unbelief in God, especially as it manifested itself in his own, or rather Teufelsdrockh's, warfare against it; the spirit, which, as embodied in the Mephistopheles of Goethe, is for ever denying,—der stets verneint—the reality of the divine in the thoughts, the character, and the life of humanity, and has a malicious pleasure in scoffing at everything high and noble as hollow and void. See Sartor Resartus.