And still, clear as it may be, it lacks an important feature, _i.e._, common sense. We are at a loss to decide whether or not Babinet accepts _en desespoir de cause_ Hartmann’s proposition that “the visible _effects of matter_ are nothing but the _effects of a force_,” and, that in order to form a clear conception of matter, one must first form one of force. The philosophy to the school of which belongs Hartmann, {61} and which is partly accepted by several of the greatest German scientists, teaches that the problem of matter can only be solved by that invisible Force, acquaintance with which Schopenhauer terms the “magical knowledge,” and “magical effect or action of Will.” Thus, we must first ascertain whether the “involuntary vibrations of the experimenter’s muscular system,” which are but “actions of matter,” are influenced by a will _within_ the experimenter or _without_. In the former case Babinet makes of him an unconscious epileptic; the latter, as we will further see, he rejects altogether, and attributes all intelligent answers of the tipping or rapping tables to “unconscious ventriloquism.” We know that every exertion of will results in _force_, and that, according to the above-named German school, the manifestations of atomic forces are individual actions of will, resulting in the unconscious rushing of atoms into the concrete image already subjectively created by the will. Democritus taught, after his instructor Leucippus, that the first principles of all things contained in the universe were atoms and a _vacuum_. In its kabalistic sense, the _vacuum_ means in this instance the _latent_ Deity, or latent force, which at its first manifestation became WILL, and thus communicated the first impulse to these atoms—whose agglomeration, is matter. This vacuum was but another name for chaos, and an unsatisfactory one, for, according to the Peripatetics “nature abhors a vacuum.”