GOETHE'S '-FARBEXLEHRE." 49 



priety of making some attempt to weigh the merits of 

 a work which exerted so great an influence in its day,* 

 I have not shrunk from the labour of such a review. 



The average reading of the late Mr. Buckle is said 

 to have amounted to three volumes a day. They could 

 not have been volumes like those of the " Farbenlehre." 

 For the necessity of halting and pondering over its 

 statements is so frequent, and the difficulty of coming 

 to any undoubted conclusion regarding Goethe's real 

 conceptions is often so great, as to invoke the expendi- 

 ture of an inordinate amount of time. I cannot even 

 now say with confidence that I fully realise all the 

 thoughts of Goethe. Many of them are strange to the 

 scientific man. They demand for their interpretation 

 a sympathy beyond that required, or even tolerated, in 

 severe physical research. Two factors, the one external 

 and the other internal, go to the production of every in- 

 tellectual result. There is the evidence without, and 

 there is the mind within on which that evidence im- 

 pinges. Change either factor and the result will cease 

 to be the same. In the region of politics, where mere 

 opinion comes so much into play, it is only natural 

 that the same external evidence should produce different 

 convictions in different minds. But in the region of 

 science, where demonstration instead of opinion is 

 paramount, such differences ought hardly to be ex- 

 pected. That they nevertheless occur is strikingly exem- 

 plified by the case before us ; for the very experimental 

 facts which had previously converted the world to New- 

 ton's views, on appealing to the mind of Goethe, pro- 



* The late Sir Charles Eastlake translated a portion of the 

 Farbenlehre; while the late Mr. Lewes, in his Life of Goethe, has 

 given a brief but Terr clever account of the work. It is also 

 dealt with by Dove and, in connection with Goethe's other scien- 

 tific labours, by Helmholtz. 



