It must now be apparent enough that our Professor, as above hinted, is a speculative Radical, and of the very darkest tinge; acknowledging, for most part, in the solemnities and paraphernalia of civilized Life, which we make so much of, nothing but so many Cloth-rags, turkey-poles, and “bladders with dried peas.”  To linger among such speculations, longer than mere Science requires, a discerning public can have no wish.  For our purposes the simple fact that such a Naked World is possible, nay actually exists (under the Clothed one), will be sufficient.  Much, therefore, we omit about “Kings wrestling naked on the green with Carmen,” and the Kings being thrown:  “dissect them with scalpels,” says Teufelsdrockh; “the same viscera, tissues, livers, lights, and other life-tackle, are there:  examine their spiritual mechanism; the same great Need, great Greed, and little Faculty; nay ten to one but the Carman, who understands draught-cattle, the rimming of wheels, something of the laws of unstable and stable equilibrium, with other branches of wagon-science, and has actually put forth his hand and operated on Nature, is the more cunningly gifted of the two.  Whence, then, their so unspeakable difference?  From Clothes.”  Much also we shall omit about confusion of Ranks, and Joan and My Lady, and how it would be everywhere “Hail fellow well met,” and Chaos were come again:  all which to any one that has once fairly pictured out the grand mother-idea, Society in a state of Nakedness, will spontaneously suggest itself.  Should some sceptical individual still entertain doubts whether in a world without Clothes, the smallest Politeness, Polity, or even Police, could exist, let him turn to the original Volume, and view there the boundless Serbonian Bog of Sansculottism, stretching sour and pestilential:  over which we have lightly flown; where not only whole armies but whole nations might sink!  If indeed the following argument, in its brief riveting emphasis, be not of itself incontrovertible and final:—­

“Are we Opossums; have we natural Pouches, like the Kangaroo?  Or how, without Clothes, could we possess the master-organ, soul’s seat, and true pineal gland of the Body Social:  I mean, a PURSE?”

Nevertheless it is impossible to hate Professor Teufelsdrockh; at worst, one knows not whether to hate or to love him.  For though, in looking at the fair tapestry of human Life, with its royal and even sacred figures, he dwells not on the obverse alone, but here chiefly on the reverse; and indeed turns out the rough seams, tatters, and manifold thrums of that unsightly wrong-side, with an almost diabolic patience and indifference, which must have sunk him in the estimation of most readers, —­there is that within which unspeakably distinguishes him from all other past and present Sansculottists.  The grand unparalleled peculiarity of Teufelsdrockh is, that with all this Descendentalism, he combines a Transcendentalism, no less superlative; whereby if on the one hand he degrade man below most animals, except those jacketed Gouda Cows, he, on the other, exalts him beyond the visible Heavens, almost to an equality with the Gods.