CHAPTER VIII.

THE WORLD OUT OF CLOTHES.

IF in the Descriptive-Historical Portion of this Volume, Teufelsdröckh, discussing merely the Werden (Origin and successive Improvement) of Clothes, has astonished many a reader, much more will he in the SpeculativePhilosophical Portion, which treats of their Wirken, or Influences. It is here that the present Editor first feels the pressure of his task; for here properly the higher and new Philosophy of Clothes commences: an untried, almost inconceivable region, or chaos: in venturing upon which, how difficult, yet how unspeakably important is it to know what course, of survey and conquest, is the true one; where the footing is firm substance and will bear us, where it is hollow, or mere cloud, and may engulf us! Teufelsdröckh undertakes no less than to expound the moral, political, even religious Influences of Clothes; he undertakes to make manifest, in its thousandfold bearings, this grand Proposition, that Man's earthly interests are all hooked and buttoned together, and held up, by Clothes.' He says in so many words, Society is founded upon Cloth ;' and again, Society 'sails through the Infinitude on Cloth, as on a Faust's 'Mantle, or rather like the Sheet of clean and unclean 'beasts in the Apostle's Dream; and without such 'Sheet or Mantle, would sink to endless depths, or

'mount to inane limboes, and in either case be no more.'

By what chains, or indeed infinitely complected tissues, of Meditation this grand Theorem is here unfolded, and innumerable practical Corollaries are drawn therefrom, it were perhaps a mad ambition to attempt exhibiting. Our Professor's method is not, in any case, that of common school Logic, where the truths all stand in a row, each holding by the skirts of the other; but at best that of practical Reason, proceeding by large Intuition over whole systematic groups and kingdoms; whereby, we might say, a noble complexity, almost like that of Nature, reigns in his Philosophy, or spiritual Picture of Nature: a mighty maze, yet, as faith whispers, not without a plan. Nay we complained above, that a certain ignoble complexity, what we must call mere confusion, was also discernible. Often, too, must we exclaim: Would to Heaven those same Biographical Documents were come! For it seems as if the demonstration lay much in the Author's individuality; as if it were not Argument that had taught him, but Experience. At present it is only in local glimpses, and by significant fragments, picked often at wide enough intervals from the original Volume, and carefully collated, that we can hope to impart some outline or foreshadow of this Doctrine. Readers of any intelligence are once more invited to favour us with their most concentrated attention: let these, after intense considera'tion, and not till then, pronounce, Whether on the utmost verge of our actual horizon there is not a looming as of Land; a promise of new Fortunate Islands, perhaps whole undiscovered Americas, for such as have canvass

to sail thither?-As exordium to the whole, stand here the following long citation:

'With men of a speculative turn,' writes Teufels- dröckh,' there come seasons, meditative, sweet, yet ' awful hours, when in wonder and fear you ask yourself ' that unanswerable question: Who am I; the thing that can say "I" (das Wesen das sich Ich nennt)? The ' world, with its loud trafficking, retires into the distance; 'and, through the paper-hangings, and stone-walls, and 'thick-plied tissues of Commerce and Polity, and all the living and lifeless Integuments (of Society and a Body), 'wherewith your Existence sits surrounded, -the sight 'reaches forth into the void Deep, and you are alone with the Universe, and silently commune with it, as one mysterious Presence with another.,

'Who am I; what is this ME? A Voice, a Motion,' 'an Appearance ;-some embodied, visualised Idea in 'the Eternal Mind? Cogito ergo sum. Alas, poor 'Cogitator, this takes us but a little way. Sure enough, 'I am; and lately was not: but Whence? How? 'Whereto? The answer lies around, written in all co'lours and motions, uttered in all tones of jubilee and 'wail, in thousand-figured, thousand-voiced, harmonious 'Nature: but where is the cunning eye and ear to whom ' that God-written Apocalypse will yield articulate meaning? We sit as in a boundless Phantasmagoria and 'Dream-grotto; boundless, for the faintest star, the re'motest century, lies not even nearer the verge thereof: 'sounds and many-coloured visions flit round our sense; 'but Him, the Unslumbering, whose work both Dream and Dreamer are, we see not; except in rare half'waking moments, suspect not. Creation, says one, lies

before us, like a glorious Rainbow; but the Sun that 'made it lies behind us, hidden from us. Then, in that strange Dream, how we clutch at shadows as if they were substances; and sleep deepest while fancying ourselves most awake! Which of your Philosophical Systems is other than a dream-theorem; a net quotient, confidently given out, where divisor and dividend are 'both unknown? What are all your national Wars, with their Moscow Retreats, and sanguinary hate-filled Revolutions, but the Somnambulism of uneasy Sleepers? 'This Dreaming, this Somnambulism is what we on * Earth call Life; wherein the most indeed undoubtingly wander, as if they knew right hand from left; yet they only are wise who know that they know nothing.

'Pity that all Metaphysics had hitherto proved so inexpressibly unproductive! The secret of Man's Being ' is still like the Sphinx's secret: a riddle that he can* not rede; and for ignorance of which he suffers death, 'the worst death, a spiritual. What are your Axioms, ' and Categories, and Systems, and Aphorisms? Words, 'words. High Air-castles are cunningly built of Words, 'the Words well bedded also in good Logic-mortar ; wherein, however, no Knowledge will come to lodge. 'The whole is greater than the part: how exceedingly true! Nature abhors a vacuum: how exceedingly 'false and calumnious! Again, Nothing can act but where it is: with all my heart; only WHERE is it? Be . not the slave of Words: is not the Distant, the Dead, ' while I love it, and long for it, and mourn for it, Here,

in the genuine sense, as truly as the floor I stand on? 'But that same WHERE, with its brother WHEN, are 'from the first the master-colours of our Dream-grotto ;

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say rather, the Canvass (the warp and woof thereof) 'whereon all our Dreams and Life-visions are painted. Nevertheless, has not a deeper meditation taught certain ' of every climate and age, that the WHERE and WHEen, so mysteriously inseparable from all our thoughts, are 'but superficial terrestrial adhesions to thought; that 'the Seer may discern them where they mount up out of ' the celestial EVERYWHERE and FOREVER: have not all 'nations conceived their God as Omnipresent and Eter'nal; as existing in a universal HERE, an everlasting 'Now? Think well, thou too wilt find that Space is ❝ but a mode of our human Sense, so likewise Time; 'there is no Space and no Time: We are-we know not what ;-light-sparkles floating in the æther of 'Deity!

So that this so solid-seeming World, after all, were but an air-image, our ME the only reality: and Nature, ' with its thousandfold production and destruction, but 'the reflex of our own inward Force, the "phantasy of

our Dream;" or what the Earth-Spirit in Faust names 'it, the living visible Garment of God:

"In Being's floods, in Action's storm,

I walk and work, above, beneath,

Work and weave in endless motion !

Birth and Death,

Au infinite ocean;
A seizing and giving

The fire of the Living:

'Tis thus at the roaring Loom of Time I ply,

And weave for God the Garment thou seest Him by."

Of twenty millions that have read and spouted this

thunder-speech of the Erdgeist, are there yet twenty

⚫ units of us that have learned the meaning thereof ?'