The existence of God, an after-life, or the soul can never be established by the empirical understanding.

Noumenal knowledge is supplied by the intuitive faculty of the Reason (or the Fantasy, as Teufelsdröckh sometimes calls it). Reason, the organ of spiritual and imaginative insight, can reveal to man supersensible realities undetectable by the understanding. ‘To the eye of vulgar Logic’, asks Teufelsdröckh, ‘what is man? An omnivorous Biped that wears Breeches. To the eye of Pure Reason what is he? A Soul, a Spirit, and divine Apparition.’ ‘Not our Logical, Mensurative faculty, but our Imaginative one is King over us,’ he insists in another place. ‘The Understanding is indeed thy window, too clear thou canst not make it; but Fantasy is thy eye, with its colour-giving retina.’ Space and Time are no barriers for the Reason, for both are modes of the understanding, and as such ‘superficial terrestrial adhesions to thought’. Reason can pierce through Where and When to the ‘celestial EVERYWHERE and FOREVER’, to ‘the universal HERE’ and ‘the everlasting Now’.

According to Teufelsdröckh, the progress of science, that is, the increasing power and dominance of the faculty of the understanding, has led to the destruction of wonder and its replacement by mensuration and numeration. The more this power waxes, the more the intuitive power of the Reason wanes. In the wintry light of the understanding, soul has become synonymous with stomach, and happiness has become the aim of man, who, in the hedonistic calculus of the Utilitarians (the ‘Motive-Millwrights’), has become ‘a dead Iron-Balance for weighing Pains and Pleasures on’. What is needed is a restoration to its rightful kingly place in the human personality of Reason, Fantasy, Intuition, and Wonder. Love, Duty, and a sense of the sacred nature of social bonds can only flourish in the light of the Reason, which can give man a saving sense of the infinite within the finite, of the religious nature of human life, and of the miraculous potential of any aspect of creation.

As such, Teufelsdröckh’s thought closely answers to M. H. Abrams’s description of ‘the central enterprise common to many post-Kantian German philosophers and poets, as well as to Coleridge and Wordsworth[:] to join together the “subject” and “object” that modern intellection had put asunder, and thus to revivify a dead nature, restore its concreteness, significance, and human values, and re-domiciliate man in a world which had become alien to him’.15 One can go even further and place Teufelsdröckh’s thought in the larger context of a perennially recurrent human effort to restore a sacred and transcendent dimension to human existence. In Living and Dying, for example, Robert Jay Lifton has spoken of the importance of a ‘symbolizing process’ that can provide ‘forms and images adequate to guide behaviour and render it meaningful’.16 Like Teufelsdröckh, Lifton has analysed the profound psychological and psycho-historical dislocations that cause systems of symbols (clothes) to lose their power to generate a sustaining sense of what he calls symbolic immortality. One might further point out that Teufelsdröckh’s chief concern in his book is the same as that of Mircea Eliade in The Sacred and the Profane: to convey a sense of what the total experience of life is like for someone living through symbols in a sacred universe, in comparison with the impoverished experience of those living without religious feeling in a completely ‘profane world’, a wholly ‘desacralized cosmos’.17

It would be misleading, however, to leave the subject of Teufelsdröckh’s thought without remarking on certain features of it that will give careful readers pause. One of them concerns the extraordinary number of Christian and biblical allusions embedded in his utterances. Keeping the connotations while changing the denotations of Christian images and concepts is a common aspect of Romantic rhetoric. But this feature of Sartor is so insistently present in the text as to suggest a deliberate attempt to blur the differences between traditional Christian beliefs and the subjectivity of Romantic regeneration. A second trouble spot is Teufelsdröckh’s insistence on the moral imperative of duty: ‘Do the Duty which lies nearest thee.’ Such an imperative, as he says, cannot be grounded in ‘Speculation’, only in ‘felt … Experience’. But in the highly schematized and rhetorical account of Teufelsdröckh’s conversion experience in Book II, one is only told about, never convincingly shown, his inner transformation. As a result, the reader cannot feel with Teufelsdröckh. At best he can give only notional assent to the professor’s moral injunctions; at worst he may come to find them factitious. An overemphasis on moral conduct, triggered by the breakdown of traditional religious beliefs, was a leading feature of the Victorian temper. The syndrome was memorably encapsulated in George Eliot’s solemn observation that while God was inconceivable and immortality unbelievable, Duty was ‘peremptory and absolute’.18 What Nietzsche said apropos of George Eliot in Twilight of the Idols could be equally well applied to Teufelsdröckh: ‘They are rid of the Christian God and now believe all the more firmly that they must cling to Christian morality … We others hold otherwise. When one gives up the Christian faith, one pulls the right to Christian morality out from under one’s feet. This morality is by no means self-evident … it stands and falls with faith in God.’19

There are other aspects of Teufelsdröckh’s thinking that seem less perennial than distinctively Victorian. One of them is instanced in the climactic passage of the climactic chapter of Sartor. Teufelsdröckh’s exposition of ‘Natural Supernaturalism’ culminates in an attempt to finesse the question that was to become of pre-eminent concern to many Victorian writers: the question of immortality, of a life after death. ‘Is the white Tomb of our Loved One’, he asks, but a ‘pale spectral Illusion! Is the lost Friend still mysteriously Here, even as we are Here mysteriously, with God!’ The answer is that only the ‘Time-shadows’ have perished and that ‘the real Being of whatever was, and whatever is, and whatever will be, is even now and for ever … believe it thou must; understand it thou canst not’. It is hard not to regard this passage as rhetoric in the pejorative sense of the term, and as an attempt to substitute the wish for the deed. Why must we believe? Not because one is assured of a life after death; but precisely because one is not.