Mary Shelley here unobtrusively introduces another key concern of the novel, often
invoked as "destiny," that broadly affects the self-conception both of individuals
and their surrounding social ambience. The concept often operates as a cover for personal
irresponsibility. Thus, wherever the word appears, the reader should be alert to the
contexts within which it is embedded and to the moral and ideological implications
of its employment.

The third of these martial virtues, firmness is likewise associated with the stance
of Satan in Paradise Lost. He opens the debate among the fallen angels in Book II
by asserting their democratic unity in opposition to God, twice calling attention
to its presumed stability through employing the adjective "firm":

     With this advantage, then
To union, and firm faith, and firm accord,
More than can be in Heaven, we now return
To claim our just inheritance of old.
-- II.35-38

Compare Hamlet:

What a piece of work is a man! how noble in reason! how infinite in faculty! in form
and moving how express and admirable! in action how like an angel! in apprehension
how like a god! the beauty of the world! the paragon of animals! And yet, to me, what
is this quintessence of dust?
-- Hamlet II.ii.312-17

God is the final cause, and Mary Shelley would have been well aware that a great many
people in England could purport to speak definitively on a subject from which Victor
backs skeptically away. Victor is perhaps remembering that Newton in his last years
wrote a two-volume commentary on the Book of Revelation, where the final cause, in
the conventional teaching of Christianity, is cryptically revealed. The secondary
and tertiary grades of causation would be, for example, the rationale behind the laws
of the universe enunciated with such clarity by Isaac Newton. An example closer to
the fictional point would be to understand why and how the Grand Unified Field operates,
since both Victor Frankenstein and Robert Walton have been engaged in trying to fathom
isolated aspects of it. See I:L1:2 and note.

A word in late eighteenth-century physiology used to cover the nervous and lymphatic
networks and various filaments within the body.

As earlier at the trial (I:7:11), Victor's egocentricity impels him to assert his
prior claim as sufferer, even as he stands in the presence of the condemned innocent.
His grounds seem to be that Justine, although surely a victim of injustice, has the
integrity of her innocence to depend upon, whereas he, although powerless to alter
the verdict, knows the grounds of its falsehood and stands morally self-perjured and
divided.

The reader will detect here the first sign of a distance between father and son that
will recur at crucial points in their subsequent relationship.

As Victor underscores his sense of being wholly out of control of his destiny, he
also suggests that, at least as a student, he had little knowledge of himself. At
Ingolstadt he finds himself transformed before his own eyes, without an understanding
of how or why this process should have happened. The lack of knowledge, of which he
has just complained to Walton, thus extends far beyond the rudiments of science.

Victor uses the term with a wholly different emphasis from that given to it by Walton
in the previous paragraph. Walton's wish to "ameliorate his fate" refers to the despondency
to which he thinks Victor has been driven by hard, but as yet undiscriminated, circumstances,
a despondency that could be alleviated by time and compassion. Victor, on the other
hand, as his narrative will begin to underscore, has come to see himself as a destined
victim of these circumstances, one who can neither alter them nor their effect on
his own condition. The disparity in usage is actually a window into character.

It is probably no accident that Victor employs diction that could also be used to
describe a massive jolt of electric current. His Creature will receive such a "fatal
impulse" at the beginning of the fourth chapter (I:4:1), when Victor "infuse[s] a
spark of being" into its flesh.