Horace, the philosophic, the epicurean, we find Propertius
asking:--

An ficta in miseras descendit fabula gentes
Et timor haud ultra quam rogus esse potest?

To return: the Pilgrim's doctrines upon the subject of conscience
and repentance will startle those who do not follow his train of
thought:--

Never repent because thy will
with will of Fate be not at one:
Think, an thou please, before thou dost,
but never rue the deed when done.

This again is his modified fatalism. He would not accept the
boisterous mode of cutting the Gordian-knot proposed by the noble
British Philister--"we know we're free and there's an end on it!"
He prefers Lamarck's, "The will is, in truth, never free." He
believes man to be a co-ordinate term of Nature's great
progression; a result of the interaction of organism and
environment, working through cosmic sections of time. He views
the human machine, the pipe of flesh, as depending upon the
physical theory of life. Every corporeal fact and phenomenon
which, like the tree, grows from within or without, is a mere
product of organization; living bodies being subject to the
natural law governing the lifeless and the inorganic. Whilst the
religionist assures us that man is not a mere toy of fate, but a
free agent responsible to himself, with work to do and duties to
perform, the Haji, with many modern schools, holds Mind to be a