dons 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 subject 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 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
themselves 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 intellectual 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 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
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.
[Footnote: Translated by Dr. William Smith of Edinburgh; Truebner,
1873.] 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 probably would
be able to bring into play the solvent transcendentalism whereby
Fichte melted his chains.

Why do some regard th