3 20 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



region of mechanical conceptions that Goethe failed. It was on this 

 side that his sphere of capacity was sliced away. He probably was 

 not the only great man who possessed a spirit thus antithetically mixed. 

 Aristotle himself was a mighty classifier, but not a stringent physical 

 reasoner. And, had Newton attempted to produce a " Faust," the pov- 

 erty of his intellect on the poetic and dramatic side might have been 

 rendered equally manifest. But here, if not always, Newton abstained 

 from attempting that for which he had no capacity, while the exuber- 

 ance of Goethe's nature caused him to undertake a task for which he 

 had neither ordination nor vocation, and in the attempted execution of 

 which his deficiencies became revealed. 



One task among many one defeat amid a hundred triumphs. But 

 any recognition on my part of Goethe's achievements in other realms 

 of intellectual action would, I fear, be regarded as impertinent. You 

 remember the story of the First Napoleon when the Austrian pleni- 

 potentiary, in arranging a treaty of peace, began by formally recogniz- 

 ing the French Republic. " Efface that," said the First Consul ; " the 

 French Republic is like the sun ; he is blind who fails to recognize it." 

 And were I to speak of recognizing Goethe's merits, my effacement 

 would be equally well deserved. " Goethe's life," says Carlyle, " if we 

 examine it, is well represented in that emblem of a solar day. Beau- 

 tifully rose our summer sun, gorgeous in the red, fervid east, scattering 

 the specters and sickly damps, of both of which there were enough to 

 scatter ; strong, benignant in his noonday clearness, walking trium- 

 phant through the upper realms and now mark also how he sets ! 

 ' So stirbt ein Held ' ; so dies a hero ! " 



Two grander illustrations of the aphorism " To err is human " can 

 hardly be pointed out in history than Newton and Goethe. For New- 

 ton went astray not only as regards the question of achromatism, but 

 also as regards a vastly larger question touching the nature of light. 

 But though as errors they fall into the same category, the mistake of 

 Newton was qualitatively different from that of Goethe. Newton 

 erred in adopting a wrong mechanical conception in his theory of 

 light, but in doing so he never for a moment quitted the ground of 

 strict scientific method. Goethe erred in seeking to ingraft in his 

 " Farbenlehre " methods altogether foreign to physics on to the treat- 

 ment of a purely physical theme. 



We frequently hear protests made against the cold mechanical mode 

 of dealing with aesthetic phenomena employed by scientific men. The 

 dissection by Newton of the light to which the world owes all its vis- 

 ible beauty and splendor seemed to Goethe a desecration. "We find, 

 even in our own day, the endeavor of Helmholtz to arrive at the prin- 

 ciples of harmony and discord in music resented as an intrusion of the 

 scientific intellect into a region which ought to be sacred to the human 

 heart. But all this opposition and antagonism has for its essential 

 cause the incompleteness of those with whom it originates. The feel- 



