ON goethe's scientific reseahciie?. 45 



have had occasion to recognise, not only in poetry, but 

 also in the descriptive parts of the natural sciences ; and 

 this man assures us with the utmost zeal that the physicists 

 are wrong : he is so convinced of the correctness of his own 

 view, that he cannot explain the contradiction except by 

 assuming narrowness or malice on their part, and finally 

 declares that he cannot help looking upon his own achieve- 

 ment in the theory of colour as far more valuable than 

 anything he has accomplished in poetry.^ 



So flat a contradiction leads us to suspect that there 

 must be behind some deeper antagonism of principle, 

 some difference of organisation between his mind and 

 theirs, to prevent them from understanding each other. 

 I will try to indicate in the following pages what I con- 

 ceive to be the grounds of this antagonism. 



Goethe, though he exercised his powers in many spheres 

 of intellectual activity, is nevertheless, par excellence^ 

 a poet. Now in poetry, as in every other art, the essen- 

 tial thing is to make the material of the art, be it words, 

 or music, or colour, the direct vehicle of an idea. In a 

 perfect work of art, the idea must be present and domi- 

 nate the whole, almost unknown to the poet himself, not 

 as the result of a long intellectual process, but as inspired 

 by a direct intuition of the inner eye, or by an outbui'st of 

 excited feeling. 



An idea thus embodied in a work of art, and dressed 

 in the garb of reality, does indeed make a vivid im- 

 pression by appealing directly to the senses, but loses, of 

 course, that universality and that intelligibility which it 

 would have had if presented in the form of an abstract 

 notion. The poet, feeling how the charm of his works is 

 involved in an intellectual process of this type, seeks to 

 apply it to other materials. Instead of trying to arrange 

 the phenomena of nature under definite conceptions, in- 

 ' See Eckermann's Conversations. 



