Carlyle, Thomas, 1795-1881 / 2008-11-10 00:00:00
CHAPTER III.
REMINISCENCES.
To the Author's private circle the appearance of this singular Work on
Clothes must have occasioned little less surprise than it has to the rest
of the world. For ourselves, at least, few things have been more
unexpected. Professor Teufelsdrockh, at the period of our acquaintance
with him, seemed to lead a quite still and self-contained life: a man
devoted to the higher Philosophies, indeed; yet more likely, if he
published at all, to publish a refutation of Hegel and Bardili, both of
whom, strangely enough, he included under a common ban; than to descend, as
he has here done, into the angry noisy Forum, with an Argument that cannot
but exasperate and divide. Not, that we can remember, was the Philosophy
of Clothes once touched upon between us. If through the high, silent,
meditative Transcendentalism of our Friend we detected any practical
tendency whatever, it was at most Political, and towards a certain
prospective, and for the present quite speculative, Radicalism; as indeed
some correspondence, on his part, with Herr Oken of Jena was now and then
suspected; though his special contributions to the _Isis_ could never be
more than surmised at. But, at all events, nothing Moral, still less
anything Didactico-Religious, was looked for from him.
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