THE VITAL ORDER 



matter but not of it, super-physical in its origin and 

 psychological in its nature. This is the view Henri 

 Bergson exploits in his "Creative Evolution." This 

 is the view Kant took when he said, "It is quite 

 certain that we cannot even satisfactorily under- 

 stand, much less explain, the nature of an organism 

 and its internal forces on purely mechanical prin- 

 ciples." It is the view Goethe took when he said, 

 "Matter can never exist without spirit, nor spirit 

 without matter." 



Tyndall says Goethe was helped by his poetic 

 training in the field of natural history, but hindered 

 as regards the physical and mechanical sciences. 

 "He could not formulate distinct mechanical con- 

 ceptions; he could not see the force of mechanical 

 reasoning." His literary culture helped him to a 

 literary interpretation of living nature, but not to a 

 scientific explanation of it; it helped put him in 

 sympathy with living things, and just to that ex- 

 tent barred him from the mechanistic conception of 

 those of pure science. Goethe, like every great poet, 

 saw the universe through the colored medium of his 

 imagination, his emotional and aesthetic nature; in 

 short, through his humanism, and not in the white 

 light of the scientific reason. His contributions to 

 literature were of the first order, but his contribu- 

 tions to science have not taken high rank. He was a 

 "prophet of the soul," and not a disciple of the 

 scientific understanding. 



221 



