Sartor Resartus | Page 3

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SARTOR RESARTUS: The Life and Opinions of Herr Teufelsdrockh
By Thomas Carlyle. [1831]

BOOK I.

CHAPTER I.
PRELIMINARY.
Considering our present advanced state of culture, and how the Torch
of Science has now been brandished and borne about, with more or less
effect, for five thousand years and upwards; how, in these times
especially, not only the Torch still burns, and perhaps more fiercely
than ever, but innumerable Rushlights, and Sulphur-matches, kindled
thereat, are also glancing in every direction, so that not the smallest
cranny or dog-hole in Nature or Art can remain unilluminated,--it
might strike the reflective mind with some surprise that hitherto little or
nothing of a fundamental character, whether in the way of Philosophy
or History, has been written on the subject of Clothes.
Our Theory of Gravitation is as good as perfect: Lagrange, it is well

known, has proved that the Planetary System, on this scheme, will
endure forever; Laplace, still more cunningly, even guesses that it
could not have been made on any other scheme. Whereby, at least, our
nautical Logbooks can be better kept; and water-transport of all kinds
has grown more commodious. Of Geology and Geognosy we know
enough: what with the labors of our Werners and Huttons, what with
the ardent genius of their disciples, 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.

But here, as in so many other cases, Germany, learned, indefatigable,
deep-thinking Germany comes to our aid. It is, after all, a blessing that,
in these revolutionary times, there should be one country where abstract
Thought can still take shelter; that while the din and frenzy of Catholic
Emancipations, and Rotten Boroughs, and Revolts of Paris, deafen
every French and every English ear, the German can stand peaceful on
his scientific watch-tower; and, to the raging, struggling multitude here
and elsewhere, solemnly, from hour to hour, with preparatory blast of
cow-horn, emit his _Horet ihr Herren und lasset's Euch sagen_; in other
words,