elaborate paraphernalia. It is true we require no paraphernalia, and
we produce unexpected results, but we are not conjuring.

To turn now to Von Hartmann. When I read Mr. Sully's article in the
Westminster Review, I did not know whether the sense of mystification
which it produced in me was wholly due to Von Hartmann or no; but on
making acquaintance with Von Hartmann himself, I found that Mr. Sully
has erred, if at all, in making him more intelligible than he
actually is. Von Hartmann has not got a meaning. Give him Professor
Hering's key and he might get one, but it would be at the expense of
seeing what approach he had made to a system fallen to pieces.
Granted that in his details and subordinate passages he often both
has and conveys a meaning, there is, nevertheless, no coherence
between these details, and the nearest approach to a broad conception
covering the work which the reader can carry away with him is at once
so incomprehensible and repulsive, that it is difficult to write
about it without saying more perhaps than those who have not seen the
original will accept as likely to be true. The idea to which I refer
is that of an unconscious clairvoyance, which, from the language
continually used concerning it, must be of the nature of a person,
and which is supposed to take possession of living beings so fully as
to be the very essence of their nature, the promoter of their
embryonic development, and the instigator of their instinctive
actions. This approaches closely to the personal God of Mosaic and
Christian theology, with the exception that the word "clairvoyance"
{89} is substituted for God, and that the God is supposed to be
unconscious.

Mr. Sully says:-