PROFESSOR TYNDALL'S ADDRESS. 659 



its author a charlatan, and attacked him with a corresponding vehe- 

 mence of language. In the domain of natural history Goethe had made 

 really considerable discoveries ; and we have high authority for as- 

 suming that, had he devoted himself wholly to that side of science, he 

 might have reached in it an eminence comparable with that which he 

 attained as a poet. In sharpness of observation, in the detection of 

 analogies, however apparently remote, in the classification and organi- 

 zation of facts according to the analogies discerned, Goethe possessed 

 extraordinary powers. These elements of scientific inquiry fall in 

 with the discipline of the poet. But, on the other hand, a mind thus 

 richly endowed in the direction of natural history may be almost 

 shorn of endowment as regards the more strictly called physical and 

 mechanical sciences. Goethe was in this condition. He could not 

 formulate distinct mechanical conceptions ; he could not see the 

 force of mechanical reasoning ; and in regions where such reasoning 

 reigns supreme he became a mere ig?iis fatiius to those who followed 

 him. 



I have sometimes permitted myself to compare Aristotle with 

 Goethe, to credit the Stagirite with an almost superhuman power of 

 amassing and systematizing facts, but to consider him fatally defective 

 on that side of the mind in respect to which incompleteness has been 

 justly ascribed to Goethe. Whewell refers the errors of Aristotle, 

 not to a neglect of facts, but to " a neglect of the idea appropriate to 

 the facts ; the idea of mechanical cause, which is force, and the sub- 

 stitution of vague or inapplicable notions, involving only relations of 

 space or emotions of wonder." This is doubtless true ; but the word 

 " neglect " implies mere intellectual misdirection, whereas in Aris- 

 totle, as in Goethe, it was not, I believe, misdirection, but sheer natu- 

 ral incapacity which lay at the root of his mistakes. As a physicist, 

 Aristotle displayed what we should consider some of the worst attri- 

 butes of a modern physical investigator — indistinctness of ideas, con- 

 fusion of mind, and a confident use of language, which led to the de- 

 lusive notion that he had really mastered his subject, while he as yet 

 had failed to grasp even the elements of it. He put words in the 

 place of things, subject in the place of object. He preached induction 

 without practising it, inverting the true order of inquiry by passing 

 from the general to the particular, instead of from the particular to 

 the general. He made of the universe a closed sphere, in the centre 

 of which he fixed the earth, proving from general principles, to his 

 own satisfaction and that of the world for nearly 2,000 years, that no 

 other universe was possible. His notions of motion were entirely un- 

 physical. It was natural or unnatural, better or worse, calm or violent 

 — no real mechanical conception regarding it lying at the bottom of 

 his mind. He afiirmed that a vacuum could not exist, and proved 

 that if it did exist motion in it would be impossible. He determined 

 a priori how many species of animals must exist, and showed on gen- 



