 The only viable way to proceed is to see him as consciously continuing to practice some of the sly deception and willful obfuscation of those Enlightenment thinkers still subject to vigorous state repression and social persecution. For this tack there are, of course, a grab bag of techniques, on display in a wide variety of modern thought, that all result in the same, highly desired end: plausible deniability. Without cultivating our own sensitivity to the highly provocative nature of controversies that to our minds may be considered settled, we cannot see how Lotze attempts to subtly open up the minds of his readers to any number of heterodox possibilities.