PROSPECTIVE The Philosophy of Clothes is now to all readers, as we predicted it would do, unfolding itself into new boundless expansions, of a cloudclapt, almost chimerical aspect, yet not without azure loomings in the far distance, and streaks as of an Elysian brightness; the highly questionable purport and promise of which it is becoming more and more important for us to ascertain.

Is that a real Elysian brightness, cries many a timid wayfarer, or the reflex of Pandemonian lava?
Is it of a truth leading us into beatific Asphodel meadows, or the yellow-burning marl of a Hell-on-Earth?
Our Professor, like other Mystics, whether delirious or inspired, gives an Editor enough to do.

Ever higher and dizzier are the heights he leads us to; more piercing, all-comprehending, all-confounding are his views and glances.

For example, this of Nature being not an Aggregate but a Whole: 'Well sang the Hebrew Psalmist: "If I take the wings of the morning and dwell in the uttermost parts of the universe, God is there." Thou thyself, O cultivated reader, who too probably art no Psalmist, but a Prosaist, knowing GOD only by tradition, knowest thou any corner of the world where at least FORCE is not?
The drop which thou shakest from thy wet hand, rests not where it falls, but to-morrow thou findest it swept away; already on the wings of the Northwind, it is nearing the Tropic of Cancer.

How came it to evaporate, and not lie motionless?
Thinkest thou there is aught motionless; without Force, and utterly dead?
'As I rode through the Schwarzwald, I said to myself: That little fire which grows star-like across the dark-growing (_nachtende_) moor, where the sooty smith bends over his anvil, and thou hopest to replace thy lost horse-shoe,--is it a detached, separated speck, cut-off from the whole Universe; or indissolubly joined to the whole?
Thou fool, that smithy-fire was (primarily) kindled at the Sun; is fed by air that circulates from before Noah's Deluge, from beyond the Dogstar; therein, with Iron Force, and Coal Force, and the far stranger Force of Man, are cunning affinities and battles and victories of Force brought about; it is a little ganglion, or nervous centre, in the great vital system of Immensity.