340 Professor Tyndall [March 19, 



WEEKLY EVENING MEETING, 



Friday, March 19, 1880. 



George Busk, Esq. F.E.S. Treasurer and Vice-President, 

 in the Chair. 



Professor Tyndall, D.C.L. F.E.S. 



Goethe's * Farhenlehre* 



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 

 generate. There was then labour 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 

 material means could, as regards the task I had undertaken, 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 afterwards 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, re- 

 mained 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 ' Farbenlehre ' 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 god-like in literature — 

 I abandoned the ' Farbenlehre,' and looked up to Goethe on that side 

 where his greatness was uncontested and supreme. 



