3 i6 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



results. But he complained of their incompleteness and lack of logical 

 force. What appears to us as the very perfection of Newton's art, and 

 absolutely essential to the purity of the experiments, was regarded by 

 Goethe as needless complication and mere torturing of the light. He 

 spared no pains in making himself master of Newton's data, but he 

 lacked the power of penetrating either their particular significance, or 

 of estimating the force and value of experimental evidence generally. 



He will not, he says, shock his readers at the outset by the utter- 

 ance of a paradox, but he can not withhold the assertion that by ex- 

 periment nothing can really be proved. Phenomena may be observed 

 and classified ; experiments may be accurately executed, and made 

 thus to represent a certain circle of human knowledge ; but deduc- 

 tions must be drawn by every man for himself. Opinions of things 

 belong to the individual, and we know only too well that conviction 

 does not depend upon insight, but upon will that man can only as- 

 similate that which is in accordance with his nature, and to which he 

 can yield assent. In knowledge, as in action, says Goethe, prejudice 

 decides all, and prejudice, as its name indicates, is judgment prior to 

 investigation. It is an affirmation or a negation of what corresponds, 

 or is opposed to our own nature. It is the cheerful activity of our 

 living being in its pursuit of truth or of falsehood, as the case may be 

 of all, in short, with which we feel ourselves to be in harmony. 



There can be no doubt that Goethe, in thus philosophizing, dipped 

 his bucket into the well of profound self-knowledge. He was obvi- 

 ously stung to the quick by the neglect of the physicists. He had 

 been the idol of the world, and, accustomed as he was to the incense of 

 praise, he felt sorely that any class of men should treat what he thought 

 important with indifference or contempt. He had, it must be admitted, 

 some ground for skepticism as to the rectitude of scientific judgments, 

 seeing that his researches on morphology met at first no response, 

 though they were afterward lauded by scientific men. His anger 

 against Newton incorporates itself in sharp and bitter sarcasm. Through 

 the whole of Newton's experiments, he says, there runs a display of 

 pedantic accuracy, but how the matter really stands, with Newton's 

 gift of observation, and with his experimental aptitudes, every man 

 possessing eyes and senses may make himself aware. It may, he says, 

 be boldly asked, Where can the man be found, possessing the ex- 

 traordinary gifts of Newton, who would suffer himself to be deluded 

 by such a hocus pocus if he had not in the first instance willfully de- 

 ceived himself ? Only those who know the strength of self-deception, 

 and the extent to which it sometimes trenches on dishonesty, are in a 

 condition to explain the conduct of Newton, and of Newton's school. 

 " To support his unnatural theory," he continues, " Newton heaps ex- 

 periment on experiment, fiction upon fiction, seeking to dazzle where 

 he can not convince." 



It may be that Goethe is correct in affirming that the will and preju- 



