662 ON THE RELATION OF NATURAL SCIENCE TO ART. 
The period thus defined, though it excels in science, shows with few 
exceptions a falling off in the fine arts. On considering the historical 
development of these two branches of human productiveness we find no 
correspondence whatever between their individual progress. When 
Greek sculpture was in its prime, science scarcely existed. True, Leo- 
nardo’s gigantic personality, which combines the immortal artist with the 
physicist of high rank, towers at the beginning of the epoch generally 
known in the history of art as the Cinquecento. Still, he was too far in 
advance of his age in the latter capacity to be cited as an example of 
simultaneous development in art and science; so little that Galilei was 
born the day of Michael Angelo’s death. The mutual development in art 
and science at the commencement of our century is, I believe, merely a 
casual coincidence; moreover, the fine arts have since been, at the best, 
stationary, whereas science strides on victoriously toward a boundless 
future. 
In fact, both branches differ too widely for the services rendered to 
science by art, and vice versa, to be other than external. ‘“ Nature,” 
Goethe very truly observed to Eckermann—little thinking how harshly 
this remark reflects on part of his own scientific work—“ Nature allows 
no trifling; she is always sincere, always serious, always stern; she is 
always in the right, and the errors and mistakes are invariably ours.” 
Fully to appreciate the truth of this, one must be in the habit of trying 
one’s own hand at experiments and observations while gazing in 
Nature’s relentless countenance, and of bearing, as it were, the tremen- 
dous responsibility incurred by the statement of the seemingly most in- 
significant fact. Jor every correctly interpreted experiment means no 
less than this: Whatever occurs under the present circumstances 
would have occurred under the same conditions before an infinite nega- 
tive period of time, and would still oecur after an infinite positive 
period. Only the mathematician, whose method of research has more 
in common with that of the experimenter than is generally supposed, 
experiences the same feeling of responsibility in presence of Nature’s 
eternally inviolable laws. Both are sworn witnesses before the tribu- 
nal of reality, striving for knowledge of the universe as it actually is, 
within those limits to which we are confined by the nature of our intel- 
lect. 
However, there is a compensation for the philosopher, laboring under 
this anxious pressure, in. the consciousness that the slightest of his 
achievements will carry him one step beyond the highest reached by 
his greatest predecessor; that possibly it may contain the germ of vastly 
important theoretical revelations and practical results, as Wollaston’s 
lines contained the germ of spectral analysis; that, at any rate, such a 
reward is not only in the reach of a born genius, but of any conscien- 
tious worker; and, finally, that science, by subduing nature to the rule 
of the human intellect, is the chief instrument of civilization. No real 
civilization would exist without it, and in its absence nothing could pre- 
