conveniences but for beauty. "The first purpose of Clothes," Carlyle thought, "... was not warmth or decency, but ornament." Custom, in the strict sense of usage and habit, had to be considered as only one of several types of clothing. Custom itself alluded both to mindless routine and to the false stimulation provided by fashionable glitter. But the technological subjugation of nature could also be considered under the heading of clothes. Technology sheltered mankind from the forces of nature, as clothes protected the body against the cold, but interposed a barrier behind which the inner meaning of the natural world was lost to sight. Art too intruded itself between humanity and a deeper understanding of things. If science destroyed "reverence" for nature, art provided no corrective. Like science, it easily became the object of a cult.

Carlyle shared with Kierkegaard the belief that the aesthetic and the ethical approaches to life are antagonistic. Sartor Resartus, a spiritual autobiography several times removed from the actual events of Carlyle's early life and elaborately disguised as the treatise of an obscure German pedant, is a work of great artistry; but it was clearly conceived as a confession, and it gives essentially the same account of unbelief, despair, and the subsequent rebirth of hope that is found in earlier Christian confessions.

What Stoicism soever our Wanderer ... may affect, it is clear that there is a hot fever of anarchy and misery raging within. ... For, as he wanders wearisomely through this world, he has now lost all tidings of another and higher.... Thus has the bewildered Wanderer to stand, as so many have done, shouting question after question into the Sibyl-cave of Destiny, and receive no Answer but an Echo. It is all a grim Desert, this once-fair world of his: wherein is heard only the howling of wild-beasts, or the shrieks of despairing, hate-filled men; and no Pillar of Cloud by day, and no Pillar of Fire by night, any longer guides the Pilgrim.

Only those who have lost hope in this way, Carlyle argues, can really expect to regain it. Even the "everlasting No" is better than the conventional religiosity of "cultivated" Christians who know God "only by tradition," if negation leads to an understanding that happiness comes only to those who give up hope of happiness.

To renounce our claims on the world is the "first preliminary moral

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