Thus have we, as closely and perhaps satisfactorily as, in such circumstances, might be, followed Teufelsdrockh, through the various successive states and stages of Growth, Entanglement¹, Unbelief, and almost Reprobation², into a certain clearer state of what he himself seems to consider as Conversion³. “Blame not the word,” says he; “rejoice rather that such a word, signifying such a thing, has come to light in our modern Era, though hidden from the wisest Ancients. The Old World knew nothing of Conversion; instead of an Ecce Homo, they had only some Choice of Hercules. It was a new-attained progress in the Moral Development of man: hereby has the Highest come home to the bosoms⁴ of the most Limited; what to Plato was but a hallucination, and to Socrates a chimera⁵, is now clear and certain to your Zinzendorfs, your Wesleys, and the poorest of their Pietists and Methodists.”

It is here, then, that the spiritual majority of Teufelsdrockh commences: we are henceforth to see him “work in well-doing,” with the spirit and clear aims of a Man. He has discovered that the Ideal Workshop he so panted for is even this same Actual ill-furnished Workshop he has so long been stumbling in. He can say to himself: “Tools? Thou hast no Tools? Why, there is not a Man, or a Thing, now alive but has tools. The basest of created animalcules, the Spider itself, has a spinning-jenny, and warping-mill, and power-loom⁷ within its head: the stupidest of Oysters⁸ has a Papin’s-Digester, with stone-and-lime house to hold it in: every being that can live can do something: this let him do. — Tools? Hast thou not a Brain, furnished, furnishable with some glimmerings of Light; and three fingers to hold a Pen withal? Never since Aaron’s Rod went out of practice, or even before it, was there such a wonder-working Tool: greater than all recorded miracles have been performed by Pens. For strangely in this so solid-seeming World, which nevertheless is in continual restless

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