10 
NATURE 
[ Nov. 4, 1869 
She creates needs because she loves action. 
Wondrous ! that she produces all this action so easily. 
Every need is a benefit, swiftly satisfied, swiftly re- 
newed.—Every fresh want is a new source of pleasure, 
but she soon reaches an equilibrium. 
Every instant she commences an immense joumney, 
and ev ery instant she has reached her goal. 
She is vanity of vanities; but not to us, to whom 
she has made herself of the greatest importance. She 
allows every child to play tricks with her; every fool 
to have judgment upon her; thousands to walk 
stupidly over her and see nothing; and takes her 
pleasure and finds her account in them all. 
We obey her laws even when we rebel against 
them ; we work with her even when we desire to work 
against her. 
She makes every gift a benefit by causing us to 
want it. She delays, that we may desire her; she 
hastens, that we may not weary of her. 
She has neither language nor discourse; but she 
creates tongues and hearts, by which she feels and 
speaks. 
Her crown is love. Through love alone dare we 
come near her. She separates all existences, and all 
tend to intermingle. She has isolated all things in 
order that all may approach one another. She holds 
a couple of draughts from the cup of love to be fair 
payment for the pains of a lifetime. 
She is all things. She rewards herself and punishes 
herself; is her own joy and her own misery. She is 
rough and tender, lovely and hateful, powerless and 
omnipotent. She is an eternal present. Past and 
future are unknown to her. The present is her 
etermty. She is beneficent. I praise her and all 
her works. She is silent and wise. 
No explanation is wrung from her ; no present won 
from her, which she does not give freely. She is 
cunning, but for good ends; and it is best not to 
notice her tricks. 
She is complete, but never finished. As she works 
now, so can she always work. Everyone sees her in 
his own fashion. She hides under a thousand names 
and phrases, and is always the same. She has brought 
me here and will also lead me away. I trust her. 
She may scold me, but she will not hate her work. 
It was not I who spoke of her. No! What is false 
and what is true, she has spoken it all. The fault, 
the merit, is all hers. 
So far Goethe. 
When my friend, the Editor of Nature, asked me 
to write an opening article for his first number, there 
came into my mind this wonderful rhapsody on 
“Nature,” which has been a delight to me from my 
youth up. It seemed to me that no more fitting 
preface could be put before a Journal, which aims to 
mirror the progress of that fashioning by Nature of a 
picture of herself, in the mind of man, which we Si 
the progress of Science. 
A translation, to be worth anything, should repro- 
duce the words, the sense, and the form of the 
original. But when that original is Goethe’s, it is 
hard indeed to obtain this ideal ; harder still, perhaps, 
to know whether one has reached it, or only added 
another to the long list of those who have tried to 
put the great German poet into English, and failed. 
Supposing, however, that critical judges are satisfied 
with the translation as such, there hes beyond them 
the chance of another reckoning with the British 
public, who dislike what they call ‘‘Pantheism” almost 
as much as I do, and who will certainly find this 
essay of the poet’s terribly Pantheistic. In fact, 
Goethe himself almost admits that it is so. Ina 
cunous explanatory letter, addressed to Chancellor 
yon Miller, under date May 26th, 1828, he writes :— 
“This essay was sent to me a short time ago from 
amongst the papers of the ever-honoured Duchess 
Anna Amelia; it is written by a well-known hand, 
of which I was accustomed to avail myself in my 
affairs, in the year 1780, or thereabouts. 
“T do not exactly remember having written these 
reflections, but they very well agree with the ideas 
which had at that time become developed in my 
mind. I might term the degree of insight which I 
had then attained, a comparative one, which was 
trying to express its tendency towards a not yet 
attained superlative. 
“There is an obvious inclination to a sort of 
Pantheism, to the conception of an unfathomable, 
unconditional, humorously self-contradictory Being, 
underlying the phenomena of Nature; and it may 
pass as a jest, with a bitter truth in it.” 
Goethe says, that about the date of this composition 
of “Nature” he was chiefly occupied with compara- 
tive anatomy; and, in 1786, gave himself incredible 
trouble to get other people to take an interest in his 
discovery, that man has a intermaxillary bone. After 
that he went on to the metamorphosis of plants, 
and to the theory of the skull; and, at length, had 
the pleasure of seeing his work taken up by German 
naturalists. The letter ends thus :— 
“Tf we consider the high achievements by which 
all the phenomena of Nature have been gradually 
linked together in the human mind; and then, once 
more, thoughtfully peruse the above essay, from which 
we started, we shall, not without a smile, compare 
that comparative, as I called it, with the superlative 
which we have now reached, and rejoice in the 
progress of fifty years.” 
Forty years have passed since these words were 
written, and we look again, “ not without a smile,” on 
Goethe’s superlative. But the road which led from 
his comparative to his superlative, has been diligently 
