34 ON Goethe's scientific researches. 



new fields of research and undergone many changes in its 

 theoretical views. I shall attempt in the following 

 Lecture to sketch the relation of Goethe's researches to 

 the present stand-point of science, and to bring out the 

 guiding idea that is common to them all. 



Tlie peculiar character of the descrijDtive sciences — 

 botany, zoology, anatomy, and the like — is a necessary 

 result of the work imposed upon them. They undertake 

 to collect and sift an enormous mass of facts, and, above 

 all, to bring them into a logical order or system. Up to 

 this point their work is only the dry task of a lexico- 

 grapher ; their system is nothing more than a muniment- 

 room in which the accumulation of papers is so arranged 

 that any one can find what he wants at any moment. 

 The more intellectual part of their work and their real 

 interest only begins when they attempt to feel after the 

 scattered traces of law and order in the disjointed, hetero- 

 geneous mass, and out of it to construct for themselves an 

 orderly system, accessible at a glance, in which every 

 detail has its due place, and gains additional interest from 

 its connection with the whole. 



In such studies, both the organising capacity and the 

 insight of our poet found a congenial sphere — the epoch 

 was moreover propitious to him. He found ready to 

 his hand a sufficient store of logically arranged mate- 

 rials in botany and comparative anatomy, copious and 

 systematic enough to admit of a comprehensive view, 

 and to indicate the way to some happy glimpse of an 

 all-pervading law ; while his contemporaries, if they made 

 any efforts in this direction, wandered without a com- 

 pass, or else they were so absorbed in the dry registra- 

 tion of facts, that they scarcely ventured to think of 

 anything beyond. It was reserved for Goethe to intro- 

 duce two ideas of infinite fruitfulness. 



The first was the conception that the differences in the 



