These were significant appendages, to be sure; not altogether adscititious. Ruffles these, indeed, endowed, as it were, with life, and growing on the dead Spirit, as the grass on the grave.
“And is it not noteworthy that our life terrene at certain epochs seems to be made up wholly of these?
That as the great Pine falls, the noxious weeds, the brambles and thorny bushes around it, grow quicker, lustier, luxuriating on the vital stores in the earth that were its own—is not this striking and perplexing, my rational friends?
Surely, Man is neither the featherless biped of the Greek Philosopher, nor the tool-using animal of the Sage of Chelsea. For animals, too, have their tools, and man, in his visible flounces, has feathers enough to make even a peacock gape.
Both my Philosophers have hit wide of the mark this time. And Man, to my way of thinking, is a flounce-wearing Spirit. Indeed, flounces alone, the invisible ones in particular, distinguish us from the beasts.
For like ourselves they have their fashions in clothes; their peculiar speech; their own hidden means of intellection, and, to some extent, of imagination: but flounces they have not, they know not. These are luxuries, which Man alone enjoys.
“Ah, Man—thou son and slave of Allah, according to my Oriental Prophets of Heaven; thou exalted, apotheosised ape, according to my Occidental Prophets of Science;—how much thou canst suffer, how much thou canst endure, under what pressure and in what Jahannam depths thou canst live; but thy flounces thou canst not dispense with for a day, nor for a single one-twelfth part of a day. Even in thy suffering and pain, the agonised spirit is wrapped, bandaged, swathed in ruffles. It is assuaged with the flounces of thy lady’s caresses, and the scalloped