t forth in native
buff, brother to the lion, not the ox, without ruffles and without
faith. His spirit, in the course of time, was born; it grew and
developed zenithward and nadirward, as the cycles rolled on. And in
spiritual pride, and pride of power and wealth as well, it took to
ruffling and flouncing to such an extent that at certain epochs it
disappeared, dwindled into nothingness, and only the appendages
remained. These were significant appendages, to be sure; not
altogether adscititious. Ruffles these, indeed, endowed, as it were,
with life, and growing on the dead Spirit, as the grass on the grave.

"And is it not noteworthy that our life terrene at certain epochs
seems to be made up wholly of these? That as the great Pine falls, the
noxious weeds, the brambles and thorny bushes around it, grow quicker,
lustier, luxuriating on the vital stores in the earth that were its
own--is not this striking and perplexing, my rational friends? Surely,
Man is neither the featherless biped of the Greek Philosopher, nor the
tool-using animal of the Sage of Chelsea. For animals, too, have their
tools, and man, in his visible flounces, has feathers enough to make
even a peacock gape. Both my Philosophers have hit wide of the mark
this time. And Man, to my way of thinking, is a flounce-wearing
Spirit. Indeed, flounces alone, the invisible ones in particular,
distinguish us from the beasts. For like ourselves they have their
fashions in clothes; their peculiar speech; their own hidden means of
intellection, and, to some extent, of imagination: but flounces they
have not, they know not. These are luxuries, which Man alone enjoys.

"Ah, Man,--thou son and slave of Allah, according to my Oriental
Prophets of Heaven; thou exalted, apotheosised ape, according to my
Occidental Prophets of Science;--how much thou canst suffer, how much
thou canst endure, under what pressure and in what Juhannam depths
thou canst live; but thy flounces thou canst not dispense with for a
day, nor for a single one-twelfth part of a day. Even in thy suffering
and pain, the agonised spirit is wrapped, bandaged, swathed in
ruffles. It is assuaged with the flounces of thy lady's caresses, and
the scalloped intonations of her soft and soothing voice. It is
humbugged into health by the malodorous flounces of the apothecary and
the medicinal ruffles of the doctor.

"Ay, we live in a phantasmagoric, cycloramic economy of flounces and
ruffles. The human Spirit s