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 the least 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 long, imagining he is 

 making way, and find himself after hours of toil at his 

 starting-point, so 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. 



