"When McCulloch's essays are hard to understand, the trouble lies less often in the internal logic of the individual arguments than in the perception of a unifying theme that runs, sometimes with exuberant clarity, sometimes in a tantalizingly elusive way, through the whole work. The consequent perplexity is partly intentional -- McCulloch is at least as much concerned with questions as with answers -- and partly the result of his way of expressing the general through the particular."