856 Professor Tj/ndall [March 19, 



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 arouse, 

 and of bringing 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 degenerates 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 some- 

 thing more is to be said. I do not know whether psychologists 

 have sufficiently taken into account that as regards intellectual endow- 

 ment, vast wealth may co-exist 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 supposing 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 conceptions, such instincts and capacities are out of 

 place. It was in this 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 



