it has come about that now, to many a Royal Society, the Creation of a
World is little more mysterious than the cooking of a dumpling; concerning
which last, indeed, there have been minds to whom the question, _How the
apples were got in_, presented difficulties. Why mention our disquisitions
on the Social Contract, on the Standard of Taste, on the Migrations of the
Herring? Then, have we not a Doctrine of Rent, a Theory of Value;
Philosophies of Language, of History, of Pottery, of Apparitions, of
Intoxicating Liquors? Man's whole life and environment have been laid open
and elucidated; scarcely a fragment or fibre of his Soul, Body, and
Possessions, but has been probed, dissected, distilled, desiccated, and
scientifically decomposed: our spiritual Faculties, of which it appears
there are not a few, have their Stewarts, Cousins, Royer Collards: every
cellular, vascular, muscular Tissue glories in its Lawrences, Majendies,
Bichats.

How, then, comes it, may the reflective mind repeat, that the grand Tissue
of all Tissues, the only real Tissue, should have been quite overlooked by
Science,--the vestural Tissue, namely, of woollen or other cloth; which
Man's Soul wears as its outmost wrappage and overall; wherein his whole
other Tissues are included and screened, his whole Faculties work, his
whole Self lives, moves, and has its being? For if, now and then, some
straggling broken-winged thinker has cast an owl's glance into this obscure
region, the most have soared over it altogether heedless; regarding Clothes
as a property, not an accident, as quite natural and spontaneous, like the
leaves of trees, like the plumage of birds. In all speculations they have
tacitly figured man as _a Clothed Animal_; whereas he is by nature a _Naked
Animal_; and only in certain circumstances, by purpose and device, masks
himself in Clothes. Shakespeare says, we are creatures that look before
and after: the more surprising that we do not look round a little, and see
what is passing under our very eyes.