If I have mentioned these matters, it is not because our present reflections are to dwell upon the philosophy of Fichte, nor yet upon the historic contrast between Spinoza and Kant. It is rather because the seriousness with which Fichte faced the issue between these two thinkers is shared by the men of all times and of all countries who have given themselves to the pleasures and to the burdens of reflection. The issue was not first raised by the seventeenth century, and was not laid with the eighteenth. That it remains one of the most interesting to which we of the twentieth century can turn our attention is just the point which I wish to bring out in the form of an example--an example taken, not indeed from the technical philosophy of our day, but from a writer holding a distinguished place among its novelists. Those of you who have enjoyed the more mundane writings of M. Paul Bourget,--his “Cosmopolis,” his “Coeur de Femme,” his “Complications Sentimentales,”--are perhaps not prepared to meet in him the philosopher and moralist that shows through his less widely known, but sometimes more admired work, “Le Disciple.” You will allow me, then, to present so much as is indispensable of the story of Bourget’s “Disciple.” * * * * * Let me begin by giving some idea of the way in which the plot of the tale may have worked itself out in the author’s mind. If a mass of rock were to fall from a cliff, and at its foot to crush before your eyes a human being--and not a mere vague humanity, but, let us say, a young girl just entering upon the promise of life--you would, of course, feel the full horror of the catastrophe. More than that, you would not be a descendant of the myth-makers, as we all of us are, were you not to cast about for some soul in the order of things on whom to blame the calamity as though it were a crime. Such shadowy beings from out of the past as the Fates, the “purblind doomsters,” are creatures of this human instinct to transform physical nature into a moral being. But it is no longer easy to take these inventions of our fancy as seriously as did our forefathers. Galileo and Newton have come between us and the myth-makers. They have enabled us, and at the same time have constrained us, to envisage the event I have just depicted as essentially a conflict between gravitational and elastic forces, not one between the human soul and the soul of Fate. The thing moves us more, no doubt, than it would had the heavy mass rolled quietly on to the bottom of the valley, because the young girl as a possible object of sympathy and love is nearer to ourselves than is a mere topographical contour; but our emotions, be they what they may, are not of themselves enough to transform a physical fact into a moral event, a catastrophe into a crime.