454 FRAGMENTS OF SCIENCE. 



elements of scientific inquiry fall in with the disciplines of 

 the poet. But, on the other hand, a mind thus richly 

 endowed in the direction of natural history may be almost 

 shorn of endowment as regards the physical and mechan- 

 ical sciences. Goethe was in this condition. He could 

 not formulate distinct mechanical conceptions; he could 

 not see the force of mechanical reasoning; and in regions 

 where such reasoning reigns supreme, he became a mere 

 ignis fatuus to those who followed him. 



I have sometimes permitted myself to compare Aristotle 

 with Goethe to credit the Stagirite with an almost super- 

 human power of amassing and systematizing facts, but to 

 consider him fatally defective on that side of the mind, in 

 respect to which incompleteness has been just ascribed to 

 Goethe. Whewell refers the errors of Aristotle not to a 

 neglect of facts, but to "a neglect of the idea appropriate 

 to the facts; the idea of Mechanical cause, which is Force, 

 and the substitution of vague or inapplicable notions, 

 involving only relations of space or emotions of wonder." 

 This is doubtless true; but the word "neglect" implies 

 mere intellectual misdirection, whereas in Aristotle, as 

 in Goethe, it was not, I believe, misdirection, but sheer 

 natural incapacity which lay at the root of his mistakes. 

 As a physicist, Aristotle displayed what we should consider 

 some of the worst of attributes in a modern physical inves- 

 tigator indistinctness of ideas, confusion of mind, and a 

 confident use of language which led to the delusive notion 

 that he had really mastered his subject, while he had, as 

 yet, failed to grasp even the elements of it. He put words 

 in the place of things, subject in the place of object. He 

 preached Induction without practicing it, inverting the 

 true order of inquiry, by passing from the general to the 

 particular, instead of from the particular to the general. 

 He made of the universe a closed sphere, in the center of 

 which he fixed the earth, proving from general principles, 

 to his own satisfaction and to that of the world for near 

 two thousand years, that no other universe was possible. 

 His notions of motion were entirely unphysical. It was 

 natural or unnatural, better or worse, calm or violent no 

 real mechanical conception regarding it lying at the bottom 

 of his mind. He affirmed that a vacuum could not exist, 

 and proved that if it did motion in it would be impossible. 

 He determined a priori how many species of animals must 



