140 APHORISMS AND REFLECTIONS 



and patient observation of Nature. The great poet 

 was no mere book-learned speculator. His acquaint- 

 ance with mineralogy, geology, botany and osteology, 

 the fruit of long and wide studies, would have 

 sufficed to satisfy the requirements of a professoriate 

 in those days, if only he could have pleaded ignorance 

 of everything else. Unfortunately for Goethe's 

 credit with his scientific contemporaries, and, con- 

 sequently, for the attention attracted by his work, 

 he did not come forward as a man of science until 

 the public had ranged him among the men of liter- 

 ature. And when the little men have thus classified 

 a big man, they consider that the last word has 

 been said about him ; it appears to the thought 

 hardly decent on his part if he venture to stray 

 beyond the speciality they have assigned to him. 

 It does not seem to occur to them that a clear 

 intellect is an engine capable of supplying power 

 to all sorts of mental factories ; nor to admit that, 

 as Goethe somewhere pathetically remarks, a man 

 may have a right to live for himself as well as 

 for the public ; to follow the line of work that 

 happens to interest him, rather than that which 

 interests them. 



On the face of the matter it is not obvious that 

 the brilliant poet had less chance of doing good 

 service in natural science than the dullest of dissectors 

 and nomenclators. Indeed, as I have endeavoured 

 to indicate, there was considerable reason, a hundred 

 years ago, for thinking that an infusion of the 

 artistic way of looking at things might tend to 

 revivify the somewhat mummified body of technical 

 zoology and botany. Great ideas were floating 

 about ; the artistic apprehension was needed to give 

 these airy nothings a local habitation and a name ; to 

 convert vague suppositions into definite hypotheses. 

 And I apprehend that it was just this service which 

 Goethe rendered by writing his essays on the inter- 

 maxillary bone, on osteology generally, and on the 

 metamorphoses of plants. 



