ON GOETHE'S SCIENTIFIC RESEARCHES. 51 



hostility to the machinery that every moment threatens to 

 disturb his poetic repose, and for his determination to attack 

 the enemy in his own camp. 



But we cannot triumph over the machinery of matter 

 by ignoring it ; we can triumph over it only by subordinating 

 it to the aims of our moral intelligence. We must familiarise 

 ourselves with its levers and pulleys, fatal though it be to poetic 

 contemplation, in order to be able to govern them after our own 

 will, and therein lies the complete justification of physical 

 investigation, and its vast importance for the advance of human 

 civilisation. 



From what I have said it will be apparent that Goethe did 

 follow the same line of thought in all his contributions to science, 

 but that the problems he encountered were of diametrically 

 opposite characters. And, perhaps, when it is understood how 

 the self-same characteristic of his intellect, which in one branch 

 of science won for him immortal renown, entailed upon him 

 egregious failure in the other, it will tend to dissipate, in the 

 minds of many worshippers of the great poet, a lingering pre- 

 judice against natural philosophers, whom they suspect of being 

 blinded by narrow professional pride to the loftiest inspirations 

 of genius. 



