s 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 Teufelsdroeckh; 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 Teufelsdroeckh 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 L