Two articles from this happy period--that on the "Signs of the Times" and that called "Characteristics"--indicate some of Carlyle's leading ideas concerning right thinking and right living. In the first, he declares the present to be an age of mechanism,--not heroic, devout, or philosophic. All things are done by machinery. "Men have no faith in individual endeavor or natural force." "Metaphysics has become material." Government is a machine. All this he thinks evil. The living force is in the individual soul,--not mechanic, but dynamic. Religion is a calculation of expediency, not an impulse of worship; no thousand-voiced psalm from the heart of man to his invisible Father, the Fountain of all goodness, beauty, and truth, but a contrivance by which a small quantum of earthly enjoyment may be exchanged for a much larger quantum of celestial enjoyment. "Virtue is pleasure, is profit." "In all senses we worship and follow after power, which may be called a physical pursuit." (Ah, Carlyle of the Present! does not that wand of thine old true self touch thee?) "No man now loves truth, as truth must be loved, with an infinite love; but only with a finite love, and, as it were, _par amours_." In the other article, "Characteristics," printed two years later, in 1831, he unfolds the doctrine of "Unconsciousness" as the sign of health in soul as well as body. He finds society sick everywhere; he finds its religion, literature, science, all diseased, yet he ends the article, as the other was ended, in hope of a change to something better. These two articles may be considered as an introduction to his next great work, "Sartor Resartus," or the "Clothes-Philosophy." Here, in a vein of irony and genial humor, he unfolds his doctrine of substance and form. The object of all thought and all experience is to look through the clothes to the living beneath them. According to his book, all human institutions are the clothing of society; language is the garment of thought, the heavens and earth the time-vesture of the Eternal. So, too, are religious creeds and ceremonies the clothing of religion; so are all symbols the vesture of some idea; so are the crown and sceptre the vesture of government. This book is the autobiography of a seeker for truth. In it he is led from the shows of things to their innermost substance, and as in all his other writings, he teaches here also that sincerity, truthfulness, is the organ by which we are led to the solid rock of reality, which underlies all shows and shams.