ON THE RELATION OF NATURAL SCIENCE TO ART. 681 
ous services? With the exception of external work, such as the repre- 
senting of natural objects, not much else than the results obtained by 
painters as to the composition and combination of colors, which, how- 
ever, have not exercised as strong an influence on chromatics as music 
on acoustics. It is known that the Greeks possessed a canon of the 
proportions of the human body, attributed to Polycletes, which, as 
Prot. Merkel recently objected, unluckily only applied to the full-grown 
frame, to the detriment of many ancient works of art. The blank was 
not systematically filled up till the time of Gottfried Schadow. This 
sanon has since become the basis of a most promising branch of anthro- 
pology—anthropometry in its application to the human races. 
If the definition of art were stretched so far as to include the power of 
thinking and conceiving artistically, then, indeed, it would be easy 
enough to find relations and transitions between artists and philoso- 
phers, though, as we remarked at the beginning, their paths diverge so 
completely. But it is not so certain that natural science would neces- 
sarily be benefited by an artistic conception ofits problems. The aberra- 
tion of science at the beginning of this century, known as German 
physiophilosophy owed its origin quite as much to esthetics as to meta- 
physics, and the same erroneous principles guided Goethe in his scien- 
tifie researches. The artistic conception of natural problems is in so 
far defective as it contents itself with well-rounded theoretical abstrae- 
tions instead of penetrating to the causal connection of events to the 
linits of our understanding. It may suffice in cases where analogies 
are to be recognized by a plastic imagination between certain organic 
forms, such as the structure of plants or vertebrate animals; but it fails 
altogether in subjects, such as the theory of colors, because it stops 
short at the study of what are supposed to be primordial phenomena 
instead of analyzing them mathematically and physically. Prof. von 
Briicke subsequently, by the aid of the undulatory theory, traced to 
their physical causes the colors of opaques on which Goethe founded 
his theory of colors and which to this day have tended rather to darken 
than to enlighten certain German intellects. The difference between 
artistic and scientific treatment becomes very evident in this example. 
Nevertheless, it can not be denied that artistic feeling may be useful 
to scientific men. There is an esthetic aspect of experiment which 
strives to impart to it what we have termed mechanical beauty; and 
no experimenter will regret having responded to its demands as far as 
was in his power. Moreover, the transition from a literary to a scien- 
tific epoch in the intellectual developement of nations is accompanied 
by a tendency to brilliant delineation of natural phenomena, arising 
from the double influence of the setting and the dawning genius. In- 
stances thereof are Buffon and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre in France, 
and Alexander von Humboldt in Germany, who, to his extreme old age, 
remained faithful to this tendency. In the course of time, this somewhat 
incongruous mixture of styles splits into two different manners. Pop- 
