THE BELFAST ADDRESS. 453 
men to look with shame upon their own bodies, as hin- 
drances to the absorption of the creature in the blessedness 
of the Creator. Finally came the scholastic philosophy, 
a fusion, according to Lange, of tlfeT~l east mature notions 
of Aristotle with the Christianity of the West. Intel- 
lectual immobility was the result. (' As a traveler without 
a compass in a fog may wander longrTmagining he is 
making way, and find himself after hours of toil at his 
starting-point, o^ the schoolmen, having "tied and untied 
the same knots, and formed and dissipated the same 
clouds," * found themselves at the end of centuries in their 
old position. | 
With regard to the influence wielded by Aristotle in the 
middle ages, and which, to a less extent, he still wields, I 
would ask permission to make one remark. When the 
human mind has achieved greatness and given evidence of 
extraordinary power in one domain, there is a tendency to 
credit it with similar power in all other domains. Thus 
theologians have found comfort and assurance in the 
thought that Newton dealt with the question of revelation 
forgetful of the fact that the very devotion of his powers, 
through all the best years of his life, to a totally different 
class of ideas, not to speak of any natural disqualification, 
tended to render him less, instead of more competent to 
deal with theological and historic questions. Goethe, 
starting from his established greatness as a poet, and indeed 
from his positive discoveries in natural history, produced 
a profound impression among the painters of Germany, 
when he published his " Farbenlehre," in which he en- 
deavored to overthrow Newton's theory of colors. This 
theory he deemed so obviously absurd, that he considered 
its author a charlatan, and attacked him with a correspond- 
ing vehemence of language. In the domain of natural 
history, Goethe had made really considerable discoveries; 
and we have high authority for assuming that, had he 
devoted himself wholly to that side of science, he might 
have reached an eminence comparable with that which he 
attained as a poet. In sharpness of observation, in the 
detection of analogies apparently remote, in the classifica- 
tion and organization of facts according to the analogies 
discerned, Goethe possessed extraordinary powers. These 
* Whewell. 
