GOETHE'S FARBENLEHRE. 319 



whose virulence and love of persecution hold each other in perfect 

 equilibrium. 



There is a great deal more invective of this kind ; but you will 

 probably, and not without sadness, consider this enough. Invective 

 may be a sharp weapon, but over-use blunts its edge. Even when the 

 denunciation is just and true, it is an error of art to indulge in it too 

 long. We not only incur the risk of becoming vapid, but of actually 

 inverting the force of reprobation which we seek to rouse, and of bring- 

 ing it back by recoil upon ourselves. At suitable intervals, separated 

 from each other by periods of dignified reserve, invective may become 

 a real power of the tongue or pen. But indulged in constantly it de- 

 generates into scolding, and then, instead of being regarded as a proof 

 of strength, it is accepted, even in the case of a Goethe, as an evidence 

 of weakness and lack of self-control. 



If it were possible to receive upon a mirror Goethe's ethical image 

 of Newton and to reflect it back upon its author, then, as regards 

 vehement persistence in wrong thinking, the image would accurately 

 coincide with Goethe himself. It may be said that we can only solve 

 the character of another by the observation of our own. This is true ; 

 but in the portraiture of character we are not at liberty to mix together 

 subject and object as Goethe mixed himself with Newton. So much 

 for the purely ethical picture. On the scientific side something more 

 is to be said. I do not know whether psychologists have sufficiently 

 taken into account that, as regards intellectual endowment, vast wealth 

 may coexist with extreme poverty. I do not mean to give utterance 

 here to the truism that the field of culture is so large that the most 

 gifted can master only a portion of it. This would be the case sup- 

 posing the individual at starting to be, as regards natural capacity and 

 potentiality, rounded like a sphere. Something more radical is here 

 referred to. There are individuals who at starting are not spheres, but 

 hemispheres ; or, at least, spheres with a segment sliced away full- 

 orbed on one side, but flat upon the other. Such incompleteness of 

 the mental organization no education can repair. Now, the field of 

 science is sufficiently large, and its studies sufficiently varied, to bring 

 to light in the same individual antitheses of endowment like that here 

 indicated. 



So far as science is a work of ordering and classification, so far as it 

 consists in the discovery of analogies and resemblances which escape 

 the common eye of the fundamental identity which often exists 

 among apparently diverse and unrelated things so far, in short, as it 

 is observational, descriptive, and imaginative, Goethe, had he chosen 

 to make his culture exclusively scientific, might have been without a 

 master, perhaps even without a rival. The instincts and capacities of 

 the poet lend themselves freely to the natural history sciences. But, 

 when we have to deal with stringently physical and mechanical con- 

 ceptions, such instincts and capacities are out of place. It was in this 



