34 ON GOETHE'S SCIENTIFIC RESEARCHES. 



subject of controversy, but the principle has maintained it 

 ground. 



Goethe's views, however, on the existence of a common type 

 in the animal kingdom do not seem to have exercised any direct 

 influence on the progress of science. The doctrine of the meta- 

 morphosis of plants was introduced into botany as his distinct 

 and recognised property; but his views on osteology were at- 

 first disputed by anatomists, and only subsequently attracted 

 attention when the science had. apparently on independent 

 grounds, found its way to the same discovery. He himself com- 

 plains that his first ideas of a common type had encountered 

 nothing but contradiction and scepticism at the time when 

 he was working them out in his own mind, and that even 

 men of the freshest and most original intellect, like the two- 

 Von Humboldts, had listened to them with something like 

 impatience. But it is almost a matter of course that in any 

 natural or physical science, theoretical ideas attract the attention 

 of its cultivators only when they are advanced in connection 

 with the whole of the evidence on which they rest, and thus 

 justify their title to recognition. Be that as it may, Goethe is- 

 entitled to the credit of having caught the first glimpse of the 

 guiding ideas to which the sciences of botany and anatomy were 

 tending, and by which their present form is determined. 



But great as is the respect which Goethe has secured by his 

 achievements in the descriptive natural sciences, the denuncia- 

 tion heaped by all physicists on his researches in their depart- 

 ment, and especially on his ' theory of colour,' is at least as uncom- 

 promising. This is not the place to plunge into the controversy 

 that raged on the subject, and so I shall only attempt to state 

 clearly the points at issue, and to explain what principle was 

 involved, and what is the latent significance of the dispute. 



To this end it is of some importance to go back to the history 

 of the origin of the theory, and to its simplest form, because at 

 that stage of the controversy the points at issue are obvious, and 

 admit of easy and distinct statement, unincumbered by disputes 

 about the correctness of detached facts and complicated theories. 



Goethe himself describes very gracefully, in the confession at 



