398 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 
CHAPTER XXVIII. 
SCIENTIFIC MATERIALISM.* 1868. 
Here, indeed, we arrive at the barrier which needs to be perpetually 
pointed out; alike to those who seek materialistic explanations of 
mental phenomena, and to those who are alarmed lest such expla- 
nations may be found. The last class prove by their fear, almost as 
much as the first prove by their hope, that they believe Mind may 
possibly be interpreted in terms of Matter; whereas many whom they 
vituperate as materialists are profoundly convinced that there is 
not the remotest possibility of so interpreting them. HERBERT 
SPENCER. 
THE celebrated Ficbte, in his lectures on the "Voca- 
tion of the Scholar," insisted on a culture which should 
be not one-sided, but all-sided. The scholar's intellect 
was to expand spherically, and not in a single direction 
only. In one direction, however, Fichte required that the 
scholar should apply himself directly to nature, become a 
creator of knowledge, and thus repay, by original labors of 
his own, the immense debt he owed to the labors of others. 
It was these which enabled him to supplement the knowledge 
derived from his own researches, so as to render his culture 
rounded and not one-sided. 
As regards science, Fichte's idea is to some extent illus- 
trated by the constitution and labors of the British Asso- 
ciation. We have here a body of men engaged in the 
pursuit of Natural Knowledge, but variously engaged. 
While sympathizing with each of its departments, and 
supplementing his culture by knowledge drawn from all 
of them, each student among us selects one subject for the 
exercise of his own original faculty one line, along which 
he may carry the light of his private intelligence a little 
way into the darkness by which all knowledge is surrounded. 
Thus, the geologist deals with the rocks; the biologist 
with the conditions and phenomena of life; the astronomer 
with stellar masses and motions; the mathematician with 
the relations of space and number; the chemist pursues 
his atoms; while the physical investigator has his own 
large field in optical, thermal, electrical, acoustical, and 
other phenomena. The British Association then, as a 
* President's Address to the Mathematical and Physical Section 
of the British Association at Norwich, 
