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-colours 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 aether 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 thousandfold 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.

Strange enough, it strikes me, is this same fact of there being Tailors and Tailored.

The Horse I ride has his own whole fell: strip him of the girths and flaps and extraneous tags I have fastened round him, and the noble creature is his own sempster and weaver and spinner; nay his own bootmaker, jeweller, and man-milliner; he bounds free through the valleys, with a perennial rain-proof court-suit on his body; wherein warmth and easiness of fit have reached perfection; nay, the graces also have been considered, and frills and fringes, with gay variety of colour, featly appended, and ever in the right place, are not wanting.
While I--good Heaven!--have thatched myself over with the dead fleeces of sheep, the bark of vegetables, the entrails of worms, the hides of oxen or seals, the felt of furred beasts; and walk abroad a moving Rag-screen, overheaped with shreds and tatters raked from the Charnel-house of Nature, where they would have rotted, to rot on me more slowly! Day after day, I must thatch myself anew; day after day, this despicable thatch must lose some film of its thickness; some film of it, frayed away by tear and wear, must be brushed-off into the Ashpit, into the Laystall; till by degrees the whole has been brushed thither, and I, the dust-making, patent Rag-grinder, get new material to grind down.