Then, in that strange Dream, how we clutch at shadows as if they were substances; and sleep deepest while fancying ourselves most awake! Which of your Philosophical Systems is other than a dream-theorem; a net quotient, confidently given out, where divisor and dividend are both unknown?
What are all your national Wars, with their Moscow Retreats, and sanguinary hate-filled Revolutions, but the Somnambulism of uneasy Sleepers?
This Dreaming, this Somnambulism is what we on Earth call Life; wherein the most indeed undoubtingly wander, as if they knew right hand from left; yet they only are wise who know that they know nothing.
"Pity that all Metaphysics had hitherto proved so inexpressibly unproductive! The secret of Man's Being is still like the Sphinx's secret: a riddle that he cannot rede; and for ignorance of which he suffers death, the worst death, a spiritual.

What are your Axioms, and Categories, and Systems, and Aphorisms?
Words, words.

High Air-castles are cunningly built of Words, the Words well bedded also in good Logic-mortar; wherein, however, no Knowledge will come to lodge.

_The whole is greater than the part_: how exceedingly true! _Nature abhors a vacuum_: how exceedingly false and calumnious! Again, _Nothing can act but where it is_: with all my heart; only, WHERE is it?
Be not the slave of Words: is not the Distant, the Dead, while I love it, and long for it, and mourn for it, Here, in the genuine sense, as truly as the floor I stand on?
But that same WHERE, with its brother WHEN, are from the first the master-colors of our Dream-grotto; say rather, the Canvas (the warp and woof thereof) whereon all our Dreams and Life-visions are painted.

Nevertheless, has not a deeper meditation taught certain of every climate and age, that the WHERE and WHEN, so mysteriously inseparable from all our thoughts, are but superficial terrestrial adhesions to thought; that the Seer may discern them where they mount up out of the celestial EVERYWHERE and FOREVER: have not all nations conceived their God as Omnipresent and Eternal; as existing in a universal HERE, an everlasting Now?
Think well, thou too wilt find that Space is but a mode of our human Sense, so likewise Time; there _is_ no Space and no Time: WE are--we know not what;--light-sparkles floating in the ether of Deity! "So that this so solid-seeming World, after all, were but an air-image, our ME the only reality: and Nature, with its thousand-fold production and destruction, but the reflex of our own inward Force, the 'phantasy of our Dream;' or what the Earth-Spirit in _Faust_ names it, _the living visible Garment of God_:-- "'In Being's floods, in Action's storm, I walk and work, above, beneath, Work and weave in endless motion! Birth and Death, An infinite ocean; A seizing and giving The fire of Living: 'Tis thus at the roaring Loom of Time I ply, And weave for God the Garment thou seest Him by.' Of twenty millions that have read and spouted this thunder-speech of the _Erdgeist_, are there yet twenty units of us that have learned the meaning thereof?
"It was in some such mood, when wearied and fordone with these high speculations, that I first came upon the question of Clothes.