74 GOETHE'S ' FAKBENLEHRE/ 



invective may become a real power of the tongue or 

 pen. But indulged in constantly it degenerates into 

 scolding, and then, instead of being regarded as a proof 

 of strength, it is accepted, even in the case of a Groethe, 

 as an evidence of weakness and lack of self-control. 



If it were possible to receive upon a mirror Goethe's 

 ethical image of Newton and to reflect it back upon its 

 author, then, as regards vehement persistence in wrong 

 thinking, the image would accurately coincide with 

 Groethe himself. It may be said that we can only solve 

 the character of another by the observation of our own. 

 This is true, but in the portraiture of character we are 

 not at liberty to mix together subject and object as 

 Groethe mixed himself- with Newton. So much for the 

 purely ethical picture. On the scientific side some- 

 thing more is to be said. I do not know whether 

 psychologists have sufficiently taken into account that, 

 as regards intellectual endowment, vast wealth may co- 

 exist with extreme poverty. I do not mean to give 

 utterance here to the truism that the field of culture is 

 so large that the most gifted can master only a portion 

 of it. This would be the case supposing the individual 

 at starting to be, as regards natural capacity and poten- 

 tiality, rounded like a sphere. Something more radical 

 is here referred to. There are individuals who at 

 starting are not spheres, but hemispheres ; or, at least, 

 spheres with a segment sliced away full-orbed on one 

 side, but flat upon the other. Such incompleteness of 

 the mental organisation no education can repair. Now 

 the field of science is sufficiently large, and its studies 

 sufficiently varied, to bring to light in the same indi- 

 vidual antitheses of endowment like that here indicated. 



So far as science is a work of ordering and classifi- 

 cation, so far as it consists in the discovery of analogies 

 and resemblances which escape the common eye of 



