360 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



another.' Our ideas of God and the soul are obviously 

 subject to this symbolic mutation. They are not now 

 what they were a century ago. They will not be a cen- 

 tury hence what they are now. Such ideas constitute a 

 kind of central energy in the human mind, capable, 

 like the energy of the physical universe, of assuming 

 various shapes and undergoing various transformations. 

 They baffle and elude the theological mechanic who 

 would carve them to dogmatic forms. They offer them- 

 selves freely to the poet who understands his vocation, 

 and whose function is, or ought to be, to find ' local 

 habitation' for thoughts woven into our subjective life, 

 but which refuse to be mechanically defined. 



We now stand face to face with the final problem. 

 It is this : Are the brain, and the moral and intellec- 

 tual processes known to be associated with the brain 

 and, as far as our experience goes, indissolubly associated 

 subject to the laws which we find paramount in phy- 

 sical nature ? Is the will of man, in other words, free, 

 or are it and nature equally ' bound fast in fate ' ? 

 From this latter conclusion, after he had established it 

 to the entire satisfaction of his understanding, the great 

 German thinker Fichte recoiled. You will find the 

 record of this struggle between head and heart in his 

 book, entitled ' Die Bestimmung des Menschen ' The 

 Vocation of Man. 1 Fichte was determined at all 

 hazards to maintain his freedom, but the price he paid 

 for it indicates the difficulty of the task. To escape 

 from the iron necessity seen everywhere reigning in 

 physical nature, he turned defiantly round upon nature 

 and law, and affirmed both of them to be the products 

 of his own mind. He was not going to be the slave of 

 a thing which he had himself created. There is a good 



Translated by Dr. William Smith of Edinburgh ; Trubner, 1873. 



