subject.


CHAPTER VIII.
THE WORLD OUT OF CLOTHES.

If in the Descriptive-Historical portion of this Volume, Teufelsdrockh,
discussing merely the _Werden_ (Origin and successive Improvement) of
Clothes, has astonished many a reader, much more will he in the
Speculative-Philosophical portion, which treats of their _Wirken_, or
Influences. It is here that the present Editor first feels the pressure of
his task; for here properly the higher and new Philosophy of Clothes
commences: all untried, almost inconceivable region, or chaos; in
venturing upon which, how difficult, yet how unspeakably important is it to
know what course, of survey and conquest, is the true one; where the
footing is firm substance and will bear us, where it is hollow, or mere
cloud, and may engulf us! Teufelsdrockh undertakes no less than to expound
the moral, political, even religious Influences of Clothes; he undertakes
to make manifest, in its thousand-fold bearings, this grand Proposition,
that Man's earthly interests "are all hooked and buttoned together, and
held up, by Clothes." He says in so many words, "Society is founded upon
Cloth;" and again, "Society sails through the Infinitude on Cloth, as on a
Faust's Mantle, or rather like the Sheet of clean and unclean beasts in the
Apostle's Dream; and without such Sheet or Mantle, would sink to endless
depths, or mount to inane limbos, and in either case be no more."

By what chains, or indeed infinitely complected tissues, of Meditation this
grand Theorem is here unfolded, and innumerable practical Corollaries are
drawn therefrom, it were perhaps a mad ambition to attempt exhibiting. Our
Professor's method is not, in any case, that of common school Logic, where