ve Oneness he ascribes to
Nature. How all Nature and Life are but one _Garment_, a 'Living
Garment,' woven and ever a-weaving in the 'Loom of Time;' is not here,
indeed, the outline of a whole _Clothes-Philosophy_; at least the
arena it is to work in? Remark, too, that the Character of the Man,
nowise without meaning in such a matter, becomes less enigmatic: amid
so much tumultuous obscurity, almost like diluted madness, do not a
certain indomitable Defiance and yet a boundless Reverence seem to
loom-forth, as the two mountain-summits, on whose rock-strata all the
rest were based and built?

Nay further, may we not say that Teufelsdroeckh's Biography, allowing
it even, as suspected, only a hieroglyphical truth, exhibits a man, as
it were preappointed for Clothes-Philosophy? To look through the Shows
of things into Things themselves he is led and compelled. The
'Passivity' given him by birth is fostered by all turns of his
fortune. Everywhere cast out, like oil out of water, from mingling in
any Employment, in any public Communion, he has no portion but
Solitude, and a life of Meditation. The whole energy of his existence
is directed, through long years, on one task: that of enduring pain,
if he cannot cure it. Thus everywhere do the Shows of things oppress
him, withstand him, threaten him with fearfullest destruction: only by
victoriously penetrating into Things themselves can he find peace and
a stronghold. But is not this same looking through the Shows, or
Vestures, into the Things, even the first preliminary to a _Philosophy
of Clothes_? Do we not, in all this, discern some beckonings towards
the true higher purport of such a Philosophy; and what shape it must
assume with such a man, in such an era?

Perhaps in entering on Book Third, the courteous Reader is not utterly
without guess whither he is bound: nor, let us hope, for all the
fantastic Dream-Grottoes through which, as is our lot with
Teufelsdroeckh, he must wander, will there be wanting between whiles
some twinkling of a steady Polar Star.

BOOK THIRD

CHAPTER I

INCIDENT IN MODERN HISTORY

As a wonder-loving and wonder-seeking man, Teufelsdroeckh, from an
early part of this Clothes-Volume, has more and more exhibited
himself. Striking it was, amid all his perverse cloudiness, with what
force of vision and of heart he pierced into the mystery of the World;
recognising in the highest sensible phenomena, so far as Sense went,
only fresh o