SCIENCE AND MAN 



conceptions, when done consciously and 

 above board, has, in my opinion, an im- 

 portant future. We are not radically 

 different from our historic ancestors, and 

 any feeling which affected them pro- 

 foundly requires only appropriate cloth- 

 ing to affect us. The world will not 

 lightly relinquish its heritage of poetic 

 feeling, and metaphysic will be welcomed 

 when it abandons its pretensions to 

 scientific discovery and consents to be 

 ranked as a kind of poetry. " A good 

 symbol," says Emerson, "is a missionary 

 to persuade thousands. The Vedas, the 

 Edda, the Koran, are each remembered 

 by its happiest figure. There is no more 

 welcome gift to men than a new symbol. 

 They assimilate themselves to it, deal 

 with it in all ways, and it will last a 

 hundred years. Then comes a new 

 genius and brings another." Our ideas 

 of God and the soul are obviously sub- 

 ject to this symbolic mutation. They 

 are not now what they were a century 

 ago. They will not be a century hence 

 what they are now. Such ideas consti- 

 tute a kind of central energy in the 

 human mind, capable, like the energy of 

 the physical universe, of assuming various 

 shapes and undergoing various trans- 

 formations. They baffle and elude the 

 theological mechanic who would carve 

 them to dogmatic forms. They offer 

 themselves freely to the poet who under- 

 stands his vocation, and whose function 

 is, or ought to be, to find " local habita- 

 tion " for thoughts woven into our sub- 

 jective 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 intellectual processes 

 known to be associated with the brain 

 and, as far as our experience goes, in- 

 dissolubly associated subject to the 

 laws which we find paramount in physical 

 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 understand- 



ing, 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 deal to be said in 

 favour of this view, but few of us prob- 

 ably would be able to bring into play the 

 solvent transcendentalism whereby Fichte 

 melted his chains. 



Why do some regard this notion of 

 necessity with terror, while others do not 

 fear it at all? Has not Carlyle some- 

 where said that a belief in destiny is the 

 bias of all earnest minds ? " It is not 

 Nature," says Fichte, "it is Freedom 

 itself, by which the greatest and most 

 terrible disorders incident to our race are 

 produced. Man is the cruellest enemy 

 of man." But the question of moral 

 responsibility here emerges, and it is the 

 possible loosening of this responsibility 

 that so many of us dread. The notion 

 of necessity certainly failed to frighten 

 Bishop Butler. He thought it untrue 

 even absurd but he did not fear its 

 practical consequences. He showed, on 

 the contrary, in the Analogy, that as 

 far as human conduct is concerned the 

 two theories of free-will and necessity 

 would come to the same in the end. 



What is meant by free-will ? Does it 

 imply the power of producing events 

 without antecedents ? of starting, as it 

 were, upon a creative tour of occurrences 

 without any impulse from within or from 

 without? Let us consider the point. 

 If there be absolutely or relatively no 

 reason why a tree should fall, it will not 



1 Translated by Dr. William Smith, of Edin- 

 burgh ; Triibner, 1873. 



