PURE REASON.
It must now be apparent enough that our Professor, as above hinted, is a
speculative Radical, and of the very darkest tinge; acknowledging, for most
part, in the solemnities and paraphernalia of civilized Life, which we make
so much of, nothing but so many Cloth-rags, turkey-poles, and "bladders
with dried peas." To linger among such speculations, longer than mere
Science requires, a discerning public can have no wish. For our purposes
the simple fact that such a _Naked World_ is possible, nay actually exists
(under the Clothed one), will be sufficient. Much, therefore, we omit
about "Kings wrestling naked on the green with Carmen," and the Kings being
thrown: "dissect them with scalpels," says Teufelsdrockh; "the same
viscera, tissues, livers, lights, and other life-tackle, are there:
examine their spiritual mechanism; the same great Need, great Greed, and
little Faculty; nay ten to one but the Carman, who understands
draught-cattle, the rimming of wheels, something of the laws of unstable
and stable equilibrium, with other branches of wagon-science, and has
actually put forth his hand and operated on Nature, is the more cunningly
gifted of the two. Whence, then, their so unspeakable difference? From
Clothes." Much also we shall omit about confusion of Ranks, and Joan and
My Lady, and how it would be everywhere "Hail fellow well met," and Chaos
were come again: all which to any one that has once fairly pictured out
the grand mother-idea, _Society in a state of Nakedness_, will
spontaneously suggest itself. Should some sceptical individual still
entertain doubts whether in a world without Clothes, the smallest
Politeness, Polity, or even Police, could exist, let him turn to the
original Volume, and view there the boundless Serbonian Bog of
Sansculottism, stretching sour and pestilential: over which we have
lightly flown; where not only whole armies but whole nations might sink!
If indeed the following argument, in its brief riveting emphasis, be not of
itself incontrovertible and final:--
"Are we Opossums; have we natural Pouches, like the Kangaroo? Or how,
without Clothes, could we possess the master-organ, soul's seat, and true
pineal gland of the Body Social: I mean, a PURSE?"
Nevertheless it is impossible to hate Professor Teufelsdrockh; at worst,
one knows not whether to hate or to love him. For though, in looking at
the fair tapestry of human Life, with its royal and even sacred figures, he
dwells not on the obverse alone, but here chiefly on the reverse; and
indeed turns out the rough seams, tatters, and manifold thrums of that
unsightly wrong-side, with an almost diabolic patience and indifference,
which must have sunk him in the estimation of most readers, --there is that
within which unspeakably distinguishes him from all other past and present
Sansculottists. The grand unparalleled peculiarity of Teufelsdrockh is,
that with all this Descendentalism, he combines a Transcendentalism, no
less superlative; whereby if on the one hand he degrade man below most
animals, except those jacketed Gouda Cows, he, on the other, exalts him
beyond the visible Heavens, almost to an equality with the Gods.
"To the eye of vulgar Logic," says he, "what is man? An omnivorous Biped
that wears Breeches. To the eye of Pure Reason what is he? A Soul, a
Spirit, and divine Apparition. Round his mysterious ME, there lies, under
all those wool-rags, a Garment of Flesh (or of Senses), contextured in the
Loom of Heaven; whereby he is revealed to his like, and dwells with them in
UNION and DIVISION; and sees and fashions for himself a Universe, with
azure Starry Spaces, and long Thousands of Years. Deep-hidden is he under
that strange Garment; amid Sounds and Colors and Forms, as it were, swathed
in, and inextricably over-shrouded: yet it is sky-woven, and worthy of a
God. Stands he not thereby in the centre of Immensities, in the conflux of
Eternities? He feels; power has been given him to know, to believe; nay
does not the spirit of Love, free in its celestial primeval brightness,
even here, though but for moments, look through? Well said Saint
Chrysostom, with his lips of gold, 'the true SHEKINAH is Man:' where else
is the GOD'S-PRESENCE manifested not to our eyes only, but to our hearts,
as in our fellow-man?"
In such passages, unhappily too rare, the high Platonic Mysticism of our
Author, which is perhaps the fundamental element of his nature, bursts
forth, as it were, in full flood: and, through all the vapor and tarnish
of what is often so perverse, so mean in his exterior and environment, we
seem to look into a whole inward Sea of Light and Love;--though, alas, the
grim coppery clouds soon roll together again, and hide it from view.
Such tendency to Mysticism is everywhere traceable in this man; and indeed,
to attentive readers, must have been long ago apparent. Nothing that he
sees but has more than a common meaning, but has two meanings: thus, if in
the highest Imperial Sceptre and Charlemagne-Mantle, as well as in the
poorest Ox-goad and Gypsy-Blanket, he finds Prose, Decay, Contemptibility;
there is in each sort Poetry also, and a reverend Worth. For Matter, were
it never so despicable, is Spirit, the manifestation of Spirit: were it
never so honorable, can it be more? The thing Visible, nay the thing
Imagined, the thing in any way conceived as Visible, what is it but a
Garment, a Clothing of the higher, celestial Invisible, "unimaginable
formless, dark with excess of bright"? Under which point of view the
following passage, so strange in purport, so strange in phrase, seems
characteristic enough:--
"The beginning of all Wisdom is to look fixedly on Clothes, or even with
armed eyesight, till they become _transparent_. 'The Philosopher,' says
the wisest of this age, 'must station himself in the middle:' how true!
The Philosopher is he to whom the Highest has descended, and the Lowest has
mounted up; who is the equal and kindly brother of all.
"Shall we tremble before clothwebs and cobwebs, whether woven in Arkwright
looms, or by the silent Arachnes that weave unrestingly in our Imagination?
Or, on the other hand, what is there that we cannot love; since all was
created by God?
"Happy he who can look through the Clothes of a Man (the woollen, and
fleshly, and official Bank-paper and State-paper Clothes) into the Man
himself; and discern, it may be, in this or the other Dread Potentate, a
more or less incompetent Digestive-apparatus; yet also an inscrutable
venerable Mystery, in the meanest Tinker that sees with eyes!"
For the rest, as is natural to a man of this kind, he deals much in the
feeling of Wonder; insists on the necessity and high worth of universal
Wonder; which he holds to be the only reasonable temper for the denizen of
so singular a Planet as ours. "Wonder," says he, "is the basis of Worship:
the reign of wonder is perennial, indestructible in Man; only at certain
stages (as the present), it is, for some short season, a reign _in partibus
infidelium_." That progress of Science, which is to destroy Wonder, and in
its stead substitute Mensuration and Numeration, finds small favor with
Teufelsdrockh, much as he otherwise venerates these two latter processes.
"Shall your Science," exclaims he, "proceed in the small chink-lighted, or
even oil-lighted, underground workshop of Logic alone; and man's mind
become an Arithmetical Mill, whereof Memory is the Hopper, and mere Tables
of Sines and Tangents, Codification, and Treatises of what you call
Political Economy, are the Meal? And what is that Science, which the
scientific head alone, were it screwed off, and (like the Doctor's in the
Arabian Tale) set in a basin to keep it alive, could prosecute without
shadow of a heart,--but one other of the mechanical and menial handicrafts,
for which the Scientific Head (having a Soul in it) is too noble an organ?
I mean that Thought without Reverence is barren, perhaps poisonous; at
best, dies like cookery with the day that called it forth; does not live,
like sowing, in successive tilths and wider-spreading harvests, bringing
food and plenteous increase to all Time."
In such wise does Teufelsdrockh deal hits, harder or softer, according to
ability; yet ever, as we would fain persuade ourselves, with charitable
intent. Above all, that class of "Logic-choppers, and treble-pipe
Scoffers, and professed Enemies to Wonder; who, in these days, so
numerously patrol as night-constables about the Mechanics' Institute of
Science, and cackle, like true Old-Roman geese and goslings round their
Capitol, on any alarm, or on none; nay who often, as illuminated Sceptics,
walk abroad into peaceable society, in full daylight, with rattle and
lantern, and insist on guiding you and guarding you therewith, though the
Sun is shining, and the street populous with mere justice-loving men:"
that whole class is inexpressibly wearisome to him. Hear with what
uncommon animation he perorates:--
"The man who cannot wonder, who does not habitually wonder (and worship),
were he President of innumerable Royal Societies, and carried the whole
_Mecanique Celeste_ and _Hegel's Philosophy_, and the epitome of all
Laboratories and Observatories with their results, in his single head,--is
but a Pair of Spectacles behind which there is no Eye. Let those who have
Eyes look through him, then he may be useful.
"Thou wilt have no Mystery and Mysticism; wilt walk through thy world by
the sunshine of what thou callest Truth, or even by the hand-lamp of what I
call Attorney-Logic; and 'explain' all, 'account' for all, or believe
nothing of it? Nay, thou wilt attempt laughter; whoso recognizes the
unfathomable, all-pervading domain of Mystery, which is everywhere under
our feet and among our hands; to whom the Universe is an Oracle and Temple,
as well as a Kitchen and Cattle-stall,--he shall be a delirious Mystic; to
him thou, with sniffing charity, wilt protrusively proffer thy hand-lamp,
and shriek, as one injured, when he kicks his foot through it?--_Armer
Teufel_! Doth not thy cow calve, doth not thy bull gender? Thou thyself,
wert thou not born, wilt thou not die? 'Explain' me all this, or do one of
two things: Retire into private places with thy foolish cackle; or, what
were better, give it up, and weep, not that the reign of wonder is done,
and God's world all disembellished and prosaic, but that thou hitherto art
a Dilettante and sand-blind Pedant."