PROFESSOR AT KONIGSBERG 105 



intellectual concept, but the material of his art becomes the 

 direct vehicle of the idea. With Goethe the phenomenal is 

 the immediate expression of the ideal, in which he is the 

 forerunner of Hegel's 'nature-philosophy', and he therefore 

 appreciates experiments that can be carried out in clear sun- 

 shine, under the open heavens, in contrast to Newton's slits 

 and glasses. Goethe could not and would not grasp the fact 

 that the pure tone of white light is due to a fusion of colours ; 

 he endeavoured by a consistent observation of facts to deter- 

 mine their connexion, so as to discover the causes of the 

 phenomena of nature, without trespassing into the realm of 

 concepts : while the physicist denies all authority to sensation, 

 and is increasingly aware that the nature of sense-perception 

 depends less upon the properties of the objects perceived than 

 upon those of the sense-organs by which he obtains his in- 

 telligence. All Goethe's conclusions and explanations are 

 accordingly fallacious. 



' Goethe is only content when he can stamp reality itself 

 with poetry. In this lies the peculiar beauty of his poems, 

 and it accounts for his resolute hostility to the mechanism that 

 threatened to disturb his poetic repose, and his determination 

 to attack the enemy in his own camp. Yet we cannot 

 conquer the mechanical laws of matter by ignoring them : we 

 can only subordinate them to the aims of moral intelligence. 

 We must understand its levers and pulleys if we are to 

 control them by our will, and herein lies the great significance, 

 and full justification, of physical research in the advance of 

 civilization/ 



Forty years later, in a lecture given at Weimar to the 

 Goethe-Gesellschaft, on l Goethe's Anticipations of Coming 

 Scientific Ideas', Helmholtz found a fresh opportunity of in- 

 sisting on the great importance of Goethe's work for the general 

 development of science. While his judgement of the optical 

 part of it remained unshaken, he now interprets Goethe's errors 

 and prejudices by his aversion to the abstractions of intangible 

 concepts, in which the theoretical physics of the day was wont 

 to reckon. He holds Goethe's protest against the abstractions 

 of matter and force to be not unjustified, since ' though they 

 were used by the great theoretical physicists of the seventeenth 

 and eighteenth centuries in a coherent and definite sense, 



