t
(_Zeitgeist_) in thyself and others, till the good soul first given thee
was seered into grim rage, and thou hadst nothing for it but to leave
in me an indignant appeal to the Future, and living speaking Protest
against the Devil, as that same Spirit not of the Time only, but of Time
itself, is well named! Which Appeal and Protest, may I now modestly add,
was not perhaps quite lost in air.

"For indeed, as Walter Shandy often insisted, there is much, nay almost
all, in Names. The Name is the earliest Garment you wrap round the
earth-visiting ME; to which it thenceforth cleaves, more tenaciously
(for there are Names that have lasted nigh thirty centuries) than the
very skin. And now from without, what mystic influences does it not send
inwards, even to the centre; especially in those plastic first-times,
when the whole soul is yet infantine, soft, and the invisible seedgrain
will grow to be an all overshadowing tree! Names? Could I unfold the
influence of Names, which are the most important of all Clothings, I
were a second greater Trismegistus. Not only all common Speech, but
Science, Poetry itself is no other, if thou consider it, than a right
_Naming_. Adam's first task was giving names to natural Appearances:
what is ours still but a continuation of the same; be the Appearances
exotic-vegetable, organic, mechanic, stars, or starry movements (as
in Science); or (as in Poetry) passions, virtues, calamities,
God-attributes, Gods?--In a very plain sense the Proverb says, _Call
one a thief, and he will steal_; in an almost similar sense may we not
perhaps say, _Call one Diogenes Teufelsdrockh, and he will open the
Philosophy of Clothes_?"

"Meanwhile the incipient Diogenes, like others, all ignorant of his Why,
his How or Whereabout, was opening his eyes to the kind Light; sprawling
out his ten fingers and toes; listening, tasting, feeling; in a word,
by all his Five Senses, still more by his Sixth Sense of Hunger, and a
whole infinitude of inward, spiritual, half-awakened Senses, endeavoring
daily to acquire for himself some knowledge of this strange Universe
where he had arrived, be his task therein what it might. Infinite was
his progress; thus in some fifteen months, he could perform the miracle
of--Speech! To breed a fresh Soul, is it not like brooding a fresh
(celestial) Egg; wherein as yet all is formless, powerless; yet by
degrees organic elements and fibres shoot through the watery albumen;
and out of vague