“With men of a speculative turn,” writes Teufelsdrockh, “there come seasons, meditative, sweet, yet awful hours, when in wonder and fear you ask yourself that unanswerable question:  Who am I; the thing that can say ‘I’ (das Wesen das sich ICH nennt)?  The world, with its loud trafficking, retires into the distance; and, through the paper-hangings, and stonewalls, and thick-plied tissues of Commerce and Polity, and all the living and lifeless integuments (of Society and a Body), wherewith your Existence sits surrounded,—­the sight reaches forth into the void Deep, and you are alone with the Universe, and silently commune with it, as one mysterious Presence with another.

“Who am I; what is this ME?  A Voice, a Motion, an Appearance;—­some embodied, visualized Idea in the Eternal Mind? Cogito, ergo sum.  Alas, poor Cogitator, this takes us but a little way.  Sure enough, I am; and lately was not:  but Whence?  How?  Whereto?  The answer lies around, written in all colors and motions, uttered in all tones of jubilee and wail, in thousand-figured, thousand-voiced, harmonious Nature:  but where is the cunning eye and ear to whom that God-written Apocalypse will yield articulate meaning?  We sit as in a boundless Phantasmagoria and Dream-grotto; boundless, for the faintest star, the remotest century, lies not even nearer the verge thereof:  sounds and many-colored visions flit round our sense; but Him, the Unslumbering, whose work both Dream and Dreamer are, we see not; except in rare half-waking moments, suspect not.  Creation, says one, lies before us, like a glorious Rainbow; but the Sun that made it lies behind us, hidden from us.  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