That even Shakespeare is reverent before fate, yet believes in the influence of character on a man's life can easily be seen from words like Helena's in 'All's Well that Ends Well':-- "Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie Which we ascribe to heaven; the fated sky Gives us free scope, only doth backward pull Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull." 'Macbeth,' with its successive steps of unhappiness following one critical evil choice is sufficient proof of Shakespear's belief in the determining power of character. 'King Lear,' with its sad result of folly shows his belief in the influence of the critical foolish decision. In the uncrowned king's conversation with his fool, occur these words: _Lear_. Dost thou call me fool, boy? _Fool_. All thy other titles thou hast given away; that thou wast born with. In Robert Browning literature has brought even up to the present time the old mystery, the ever continuing struggle between fatalism and freedom. But to him, as to most thinkers of his day, fate has become the instrument of a God, a divine Providence rules the world, while man, too, has his little realm of choice. At the present time this discussion is carried to a greater extent than ever before. The one side finds its expression in our modern idealistic philosophy, the other in our modern sceptical science. Idealistic philosophy, since Kant, has been trying to lay the responsibility for all life upon the free moral choice. It has been seeking to prove that the spiritual is the source of life. Modern science, on the other hand, with its keen, wide-opened eyes, has tried to lay all the necessary sequence of law, forgetting at times that law is but the explanation of the phenomena. Science sometimes refuses to consider such phenomena as require a new point of view, beyond the physical and mental,--a moral point of view. By this refusal to recognize the spiritual part of man, science attempts to avoid a second mystery. The mystery of the union of the physical and mental realms it has been forced, long since, to accept. It would shun the moral realms because that, too, entails its mystery of connection. Once accept physical life, and science is, in so far, free from impassable gulfs. Once accept mental life and that realm also becomes capable of study. Let the free moral nature once be accepted, and again we shall have reached firm footing. But to cross between these realms by law, by reason, is impossible; for life, any kind of life, is its own only explanation.