3 o8 HERMANN VON HELMHOLTZ 



intellectual life had lost its former hold and its coherence; every- 

 thing had to be presented in a new light, and new questions raised 

 for discussion. Since the problems that had to be solved were 

 principally those of morals, aesthetics, and metaphysics, it was in 

 Helmholtz's opinion natural that the learned men of all nations 

 should precipitate themselves upon philosophy. Criticism of the 

 sources of knowledge was initiated, and the German tempera- 

 ment could not break loose from metaphysics, which exerted a 

 dangerous fascination upon it, until there was nothing left to find. 

 Then, in the second half of the Eighteenth Century, the rejuve- 

 nated mental life of the nation blossomed into its artistic prime, 

 and all hearts turned from a joyless civic and political existence 

 to the realms of poetry or philosophy. ' The work of the man 

 of science appeared narrow, poor, and unimportant in com- 

 parison with the great conceptions of philosophers and thinkers/ 

 Helmholtz recognizes clearly that this movement broke the 

 Napoleonic yoke, and in its great poems set the noblest ideals 

 of the German nation, but 'sanctuary in an ideal world is a false 

 aid of brief duration ; it only helps the enemy to his goal, and 

 where knowledge reflects itself repeatedly it becomes objectless 

 and empty, or is lost in phrases and illusions '. 



The reaction against this tendency set in not only in the 

 region of natural science, but in history, aesthetics, and in 

 philology also. It was perceived in all directions that facts 

 must be known before their laws can be established. 



Helmholtz urges the younger students, in his Rectorial 

 Address, to pursue Science for its own sake, and advances 

 ideas of high ethical import, such as he clothed in beautiful 

 words, with modest but assured self-consciousness, in his famous 

 Tischrede in 1891 : 



' I will not say that higher ethical motives were not co-operating 

 with scientific curiosity, and sense of duty as an official of the 

 State, in the first half of my life, when I was still obliged to work 

 for my living; but it was harder to be certain of their efficacy so 

 long as egoistic motives drove one to work. The same is the 

 case with most workers. Later, with an assured position, when 

 those who have no inward impulse towards science may cease 

 to work, there is pre-eminently, in those who do work on, a 

 higher conception of their relation to Humanity. They 

 gradually realize by their own experience how the ideas that 



