FROMMEL, GASTON (1862-1906), Swiss theologian, pro fessor of theology in Geneva from 1894 to 1906. An Alsatian by birth, he belonged mainly to French Switzerland. He may best be described as continuing the spirit of Vinet (q.v.) amid later mental conditions. Like Vinet, he derived his philosophy of religion from a deeply personal experience of the Gospel of Christ as meeting the demands of the moral consciousness; but he developed even further than Vinet the psychological analysis of conscience and the method of verifying every doctrine by direct reference to spiritual experience. Both made much of moral in dividuality or personality as the criterion of reality, believing that its correlation with Christianity, both historically and philo sophically, was most intimate. But while Vinet's stress was on the liberty from human authority essential to the moral consciousness, the changed needs of the age caused Frommel to develop rather the aspect of man's dependence on God's spiritual initiative, "the conditional nature of his liberty." "Liberty is not the primary, but the secondary characteristic" of conscience ; "before being free, it is the subject of obligation." Frommel claimed that a deeper analysis carries us beyond the subjectivity of Kant's categorical imperative, since consciousness of obligation was "une experience imposee sous le mode de l'absolu." By iinposee (Malan's phrase) he emphasized the pri ority of man's sense of obligation to his moral consciousness either of self or of God. He appealed to the psychology of the subcon scious for confirmation of his analysis, insisting on priority to self-conscious thought as a mark of metaphysical objectivity in the case of moral, no less than of physical experience. He found in the Christian revelation the same characteristics as be longed to the universal revelation in conscience, viz. God's sover eign initiative and his living action in history. From this stand point he argued against a purely psychological type of religion (agnosticisme religieux, as he termed it)—a tendency to which he saw even in A. Sabatier and the . symbolo fideisme of the Paris School—as giving up a real faith. Like Vinet, Frommel was a man of letters and a penetrating critic of men and systems : see his Etudes litteraires et Morales (1907).