But this momentary renewal proves a false dawn because it is bathed in the light of the ego as well as of the setting sun. It is meant to be contrasted with the mature reintegration with the natural and human worlds that Teufelsdröckh experiences in the ‘Everlasting Yea’ chapter after he has gone through the three stages of the conversion experience that are the climax of his spiritual development.

The ‘Everlasting No’ chapter describes Teufelsdröckh’s spiritual nadir. The universe has become ‘all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb’. The turning-point in this dark night is described rather than enacted; it comes in the Rue Saint Thomas de l’Enfer in Paris when ‘my whole ME’ stands up and says NO to negation: ‘I am not thine, but Free, and for ever hate thee!’ The peal of the Everlasting No is followed by the ‘Centre of Indifference’ chapter in which Teufelsdröckh’s attention is shown to be shifting away from his own sorrows to the world outside him—to towns and cities, the battlefield of Wagram, the lives of great men.

Finally comes the ‘Everlasting Yea’, the advent of which is neither described nor enacted. Teufelsdröckh simply says that ‘the heavy dreams rolled gradually away, and I awoke to a new Heaven and a new Earth’. The enabling condition of this culminating phase of spiritual development, ‘the first preliminary moral Act’, is said to be ‘Annihilation of Self’. Its hallmarks are a ‘Divine Depth of Sorrow”, the renunciation of happiness in favour of doing ‘the Duty which lies nearest thee’, and recognizing that the ideal is not out there or up there, but ‘in thyself’: ‘America is here or nowhere.’ ‘Love not Pleasure; love God’, urges Teufelsdröckh: ‘This is the EVERLASTING YEA, wherein all contradiction is solved.’ The God he describes is a presence ‘felt in my own Heart’. Such a feeling ‘is Belief; all else is Opinion’. Thus the antagonism between head and heart is resolved through the demotion of the former: ‘all Speculation is by nature endless, formless, a vortex amid vortices: only, by a felt indubitable certainty of Experience’ does the human personality ‘find any centre to revolve round’. And thus, too, is the importance of spiritual biography underlined; for truth is grounded not in any universal axioms of reason, but in personal subjective experience authenticated by the feeling self.

In Book III the Editor returns to expounding the thought of Die Kleider, especially the key concepts of symbols, Helotage, organic filaments, and Natural Supernaturalism. There is clearly a close parallel between Teufelsdröckh’s predictions of social regeneration and the process of his individual regeneration described in Book II. As Carlyle had put it in his letter of 1831 to his brother John, the material in the two books is ‘in the same vein’. But this means that his social diagnosis and prescription are subjective in origin and can no more be intellectually justified or perhaps even understood than can the personal beliefs of Book II. They, too, must be felt in the heart. For this reason, it is especially important in Book III to notice the reactions of the Editor, who is the reader’s surrogate. Will the empirically minded English Editor, who respects the ‘Institutions of our Ancestors’, come to a felt acceptance of the radical social views of the German Philosopher?

During the course of Sartor Resartus, it is noticeable that the Editor becomes increasingly involved with the material on which he is working. In Book I he had admitted that great efforts, ‘partly of intellect, partly of imagination’, had to be made if Teufelsdröckh’s life and work were to be sympathetically understood and ‘a firm bridge’ constructed for the British reader. In the first two books, the Editor experienced repeated difficulties in becoming habituated to Teufelsdröckh’s idiom and ideas. But by Book III, one notices a certain degree of convergence of Editor and subject. At the opening of the book, for example, the Editor admits that he has adopted his subject’s method of proceeding ‘leap by leap’ rather than ‘straightforward, step by step’; and he subsequently admits that Teufelsdröckh’s mode of utterance has, unhappily, somewhat affected his own. He also affirms that after ‘long painful meditation’ he has found the cornerstone of Teufelsdröckh’s thought, the ‘stupendous Section, headed Natural Supernaturalism’, not unintelligible, ‘but on the contrary to grow clear, nay radiant, and all-illuminating’.

At the same time, however, residual doubts and uncertainties continue to plague the Editor throughout his labours. ‘Up to this hour’, he exclaims in Book I, ‘we have never fully satisfied ourselves’ whether there is in Die Kleider ‘a tone and hum of real Humour, which we reckon among the very highest qualities of Genius, or some remote echo of mere Insanity and Inanity’. At the end of Book II he confesses to a painful suspicion that the autobiographical documents on which he has relied for Teufelsdröckh’s life history are partly a deliberate mystification. Near the end of Book III he repeats once again that with Teufelsdröckh ‘there ever hovers some shade of doubt’ concerning his sincerity and his intentions. And while the Editor does feel that he has been successful in constructing a bridge between the German philosopher and the British Public, he has to admit that it is ‘no firm arch, overspanning the Impassable with paved highway’, but only a ‘zigzag series of rafts floating tumultuously thereon’.

[5]

Is the reader of Sartor Resartus meant to share the Editor’s doubts, or to regard them as examples of the Editor’s imperfect comprehension of his subject? The question is crucially important in connection with the reader’s reception of the text. In considering the question, it is important to realize that Teufelsdröckh’s philosophical beliefs are essentially a simplified version of the leading themes of German Idealist philosophy, especially as it contrasts with an equally simplified version of eighteenth-century British empirical philosophy, the nineteenth-century name for which was Utilitarianism. The fundamental premise of Teufelsdröckh’s thought is the epistemological distinction between the understanding (Verstand) and Reason (Vernunft). The former mental faculty is essentially passive, containing impressions ultimately derived from sense experience. Such empirical knowledge is strictly bounded by the containers of space and time, by ‘WHERE, with its brother, WHEN’, as Teufelsdröckh puts it, and can supply knowledge only of the appearances of things, never of things in themselves. Such knowledge can be objective and accurate, even scientific; and it can certainly be useful; but it can never tell one anything about things-in-themselves or about noumenal (as opposed to phenomenal) objects of thought.