fessor William James has proclaimed
the same doctrine in a still wider application in his Pragmatism. The
essential element in both systems is that they lay the direct stress of
life, not upon abstract theory but upon experience and vital energy.
This transference from theorising and emotionalism to the prompt and
vigorous exercise of will upon the immediate circumstance, is Carlyle's
understanding of the word Conversion.

When it comes to the particular question of what work the Professor is
to do, the answer is that he has within him the Word Omnipotent, waiting
for a man to speak it forth. And here in this volume upon Clothes, this
_Sartor Resartus_, is his deliberate response to the great demand. At
first he seems here to relapse from the high seriousness of the chapters
we have just been reading, and to come with too great suddenness to
earth again. Yet that is not the case; for, as we shall see, the rest of
the volume is the attempt to reconstruct the universe on the principles
he has discovered within his own experience. The story to which we have
been listening is Teufelsdroeckh's way of discovering reality; now we are
to have the statement of it on the wider planes of social and other
philosophy. This we shall briefly review, but the gist of the book is in
what we have already found. To most readers the quotations must have
been old and well-remembered friends. Yet they will pardon the
reappearance of them here, for they have been amongst the most powerful
of all winged words spoken in England for centuries. The reason for the
popularity of the book is that these biographical chapters are the
record of normal and typical human experience. This, or something like
this, will repeat itself so long as human nature lasts; and men, grown
discouraged with the mystery and bewilderment of life, will find heart
from these chapters to start "once more on their adventure, brave and
new."

This, then, is Teufelsdroeckh's reconstruction of the world; and the
world of each one of us requires some such reconstruction. For life is
full of deceptive outward appearances, from which it is the task of
every man to come back in his own way to the realities within. The
shining example of such reconstruction is that of George Fox, who sewed
himself a suit of leather and went out to the woods with it--"Every
stitch of his needle pricking into the heart of slavery, and
world-worship, and the Mammon god." The leather suit is an allegory