GOETHE'S FARRENLEHRE. 215 



scientific character." * Before a writer permits himself to use words 

 such as these, he should be very sure that he has firm ground under 

 his feet ; and even then it would be better to leave them unsaid. 

 There is nothing in any line of scientific research to make a man of 

 undoubted learning and ability forget the courtesy which he owes to 

 another. 







GOETHE'S FAKBEJSXEHKE. (THEOKY OF COLOES.f) 



By Professor JOHN TTNDALL, F. K. S. 



IN the days of my youth, when life was strong and aspiration high, 

 I found myself standing one fine summer evening beside a statue 

 of Goethe in a German city. Following the current of thought and 

 feeling started by the associations of the place, I eventually came to 

 the conclusion that, judging even from a purely utilitarian point of 

 view, a truly noble work of art was the most suitable memorial for a 

 great man. Such a work appeared to me capable of exciting a motive 

 force within the mind which no purely material influence could gen- 

 erate. There was then labor before me of the most arduous kind. 

 There were formidable practical difficulties to be overcome, and very 

 small means wherewith to overcome them, and yet I felt that no ma- 

 terial means could, as regards the task I had undei'taken, plant within 

 me a resolve comparable with that which the contemplation of this 

 statue of Goethe was able to arouse. 



My reverence for the poet had been awakened by the writings of 

 Mr. Carlyle, and it was afterward confirmed and consolidated by the 

 writings of Goethe himself. But there was one of the poet's works, 

 which, though it lay directly in the line of my own studies, remained 

 for a long time only imperfectly known to me. My opinion of that 

 work was not formed on hearsay. I dipped into it so far as to make 

 myself acquainted with its style, its logic, and its general aim ; but 

 having done this I laid it aside, as something which jarred upon my 

 conception of Goethe's grandeur. The mind willingly rounds off the 

 image which it venerates, and only acknowledges with reluctance that 

 it is on any side incomplete ; and believing that Goethe in the " Far- 

 benlehre" was wrong in his intellectual, and perverse in his moral 

 judgments seeing, above all things, that he had forsaken the lofty 

 impersonal calm which was his chief characteristic, and which had 

 entered into my conception of the godlike in literature I abandoned 



* " Studies," etc., pp. 360, 3*71. 



\ A discourse delivered in the Royal Institution of Great Britain, on Friday evening, 

 March 19, 1880. 



