He was a wretched orator, this professor, but a wonderful thinker and expounder. The technical terms he employed were bewildering--that extraordinary terminology in which "an sich" meant according to its constitution, and "an und für sich," the completed, absolute existence; but his hearers became accustomed to it, and soon began to feel as if they were floating above the earth in abstractions so refined and so ingeniously complementary that the dialectic of Plato's _Parmenides_ seemed clumsy in comparison; at times as if they were penetrating ever deeper into ever more concrete subjects. The speaker's voice grew stronger, he looked round with a free, confident glance while, with a few pregnant words, he characterised an intellectual movement, an age, a nation, or some specially remarkable individual, such as that nephew of Rameau's who, without being named, is described in the _Phænomenology_. The novice who heard the famous thinker propound, without any illustration, the abstract ideas which applied to everything--spirit and nature, matter and mind--ideas of which it was said that they enclosed the seen and the unseen in their mysteriously but methodically woven net--might at first feel tempted to run away, or at any rate not to come back again. But he did come back, for the laborious delivery soon fascinated him, and he began to feel that he was making progress. Every now and then a lightning-flash of thought illuminated the darkness. The pupil began to comprehend that, in his master's mind, there was no question of this being a system like other systems, a more profound or more comprehensive plan of instruction than other plans, but that the man regarded himself as the originator of an entirely new science, which comprehended the whole of existence, explained everything, God and the world, and was the completion of everything; for the thoughts of all earlier thinkers were discernible in his system, as all the lower animal forms are traceable in the human embryo; everything that had gone before had prepared his way, all endeavours found their fulfilment in him; from this time forwards progress could only lie in the direction of more special development of the separate sections of the great completed plan.