ON GOETHE'S SCIENTIFIC RESEARCHES. 43 



art. In his studies on morphology, he reminds one of a spectator 

 at a play, with strong artistic sympathies. His delicate instinct 

 makes him feel how all the details fall into their places, and 

 work harmoniously together, and how some common purpose 

 governs the whole ; and yet while this exquisite order and sym- 

 metry give him intense pleasure he cannot formulate the dominant 

 idea. That is reserved for the scientific critic of the drama, 

 while the artistic spectator feels perhaps, as Goethe did in the 

 presence of natural phenomena, an antipathy to such dissection, 

 fearing, though without reason, that his pleasure may be spoilt 

 by it. 



Goethe's point of view in the Theory of Colour is much the 

 same. We have seen that he rebels against the physical theory 

 just at the point where it gives complete and consistent expla- 

 nations from principles once accepted. Evidently it is not the 

 insufficiency of the theory to explain individual cases that is a 

 stumbling-block to him. He takes offence at the assumption 

 made for the sake of explaining the phenomena, which seem to 

 him so absurd, that he looks upon the interpretation as no inter- 

 pretation at all Above all, the idea that white light could be 

 composed of coloured light seems to have been quite inconceiv- 

 able to him at the very beginning of the controversy, he rails 

 at the disgusting Newtonian white of the natural philosophers, 

 an expression which seems to show that this was the assumption 

 that most annoyed him. 



Again, in his later attacks on Newton, which were not 

 published till after his Theory of Colour was completed, he 

 rather strives to show that Newton's facts might be explained 

 on his own hypothesis, and that therefore Newton's hypothesis 

 was not fully proved, than attempts to prove that hypothesis 

 inconsistent with itself or with the facts. Nay, he seems to 

 consider the obviousness of his own hypothesis so overwhelming, 

 that it need only be brought forward to upset Newton's entirely. 

 There are only a few passages where he disputes the experiments 

 described by Newton. Some of them, apparently, he could not 

 succeed in refuting, because the result is not equally easy to 

 observe in all positions of the lenses used, and because he was 



