enable them to follow your views of Man and Nature. In
short, there is not a sufficient basis of the common to justify
the amount of peculiarity in the work. In a book of science, these
considerations would of course be inapplicable; but then the whole shape
and coloring of the book must be altered to make it such; and a man
who wishes merely to get at the philosophical result, or summary of the
whole, will regard the details and illustrations as so much unprofitable
surplusage.

"The sense of strangeness is also awakened by the marvellous
combinations, in which the work abounds to a degree that the common
reader must find perfectly bewildering. This can hardly, however, be
treated as a consequence of the _style_; for the style in this respect
coheres with, and springs from, the whole turn and tendency of thought.
The noblest images are objects of a humorous smile, in a mind which
sees itself above all Nature and throned in the arms of an Almighty
Necessity; while the meanest have a dignity, inasmuch as they are
trivial symbols of the same one life to which the great whole
belongs. And hence, as I divine, the startling whirl of incongruous
juxtaposition, which of a truth must to many readers seem as amazing as
if the Pythia on the tripod should have struck up a drinking-song, or
Thersites had caught the prophetic strain of Cassandra.

"All this, of course, appears to me true and relevant; but I cannot help
feeling that it is, after all, but a poor piece of quackery to comment
on a multitude of phenomena without adverting to the principle which
lies at the root, and gives the true meaning to them all. Now this
principle I seem to myself to find in the state of mind which is
attributed to Teufelsdrockh; in his state of mind, I say, not in his
opinions, though these are, in him as in all men, most important,--being
one of the best indices to his state of mind. Now what distinguishes
him, not merely from the greatest and best men who have been on earth
for eighteen hundred years, but from the whole body of those who have
been working forwards towards the good, and have been the salt and light
of the world, is this: That he does not believe in a God. Do not be
indignant, I am blaming no one;--but if I write my thoughts, I must
write them honestly.

"Teufelsdrockh does not belong to the herd of sensual and thoughtless
men; because he does perceive in all Existence a unity of power; because
he does believe that this is a re