VI. 



SCIENTIFIC MATERIALISM. 



The celebrated Fichte, in his lectures on the " Vo- 

 cation of the Scholar," insisted on a culture which should 

 not be 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, be- 

 come 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 sup- 

 plement 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 

 illustrated by the constitution and the labors of the British 

 Association. We have 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 sur- 

 rounded. Thus, the geologist deals with the rocks ; the 

 biologist with the conditions and phenomena of life ; the 

 astronomer with stellar masses and motions ; the mathe- 

 matician with the relations of space and number; the 



