xil REPORT—1874. 
tion of the notions of their predecessors. It was a time when thought had 
become abject, and when the acceptance of mere authority led, as it always 
does in science, to intellectual death. Natural events, instead of being 
traced to physical, were referred to moral causes ; while an exercise of the 
phantasy, almost as degrading as the spiritualism of the present day, took the 
place of scientific speculation. Then came the mysticism of the Middle Ages, 
Magic, Alchemy, the Neo-platonic philosophy, with its visionary though 
sublime abstractions, which caused men to look with shame upon their own 
bodies as hindrances to the absorption of the creature in the blessedness of the 
Creator. Finally came the Scholastic philosophy, a fusion, according to 
Lange, of the least-mature notions of Aristotle with the Christianity of the 
west. Intellectual immobility was the result. As a traveller without a 
compass in a fog may wander long, imagining he is making way, and find 
himself after hours of toil at his starting-point, so the schoolmen, having 
tied and untied the same knots and formed and dissipated the same clouds, 
found themselves at the end of centuries in their old position. 
With regard to the influence wielded by Aristotle in the Middle Ages, and 
which, though to a less extent, he still wields, I would ask permission to 
make one remark. When the human mind has achieved greatness and given 
evidence of extraordinary power in-any domain, there is a tendency to credit 
it with similar power in all other domains. Thus theologians have found 
comfort and assurance in the thought that Newton dealt with the question of 
revelation, forgetful of the fact that the very devotion of his powers, through 
all the best years of his life, to a totally different class of ideas, not to speak 
of any natural disqualification, tended to render him less instead of more 
competent to deal with theological and historic questions. Goethe, starting 
from his established greatness as a poet, and indeed from his positive dis- 
coveries in Natural History, produced a profound impression among the 
painters of Germany, when he published his ‘ Farbenlehre,’ in which he 
endeayoured to overthrow Newton’s theory of colours. This theory he 
deemed so obviously absurd, that he considered its author a charlatan, and 
attacked him with a corresponding vehemence of language. In the domain 
of natural history Goethe had made really considerable discoveries; and we 
have high authority for assuming that, had he devoted himself wholly to 
that side of science, he might have reached in it an eminence comparable 
‘with that which he attained as a poet. In sharpness of observation, in the 
detection of analogies however apparently remote, in the classification and 
organization of facts according to the analogies discerned, Goethe possessed 
extraordinary powers. These elements of scientific inquiry fall in with the 
discipline of the poet. But, on the other hand, a mind thus richly endowed 
in the direction of natural history, may be almost shorn of endowment as 
regards the more strictly called physical and mechanical sciences. Goethe 
was in this condition. He could not formulate distinct mechanical concep- 
tions; he could not see the force of mechanical reasoning ; and in regions 
where such reasoning reigns supreme he became a mere ignis fatuus to 
those who followed him. 
I have sometimes permitted myself to compare Aristotle with Goethe, to 
credit the Stagirite with an almost superhuman power of amassing and syste- 
matizing facts, but to consider him fatally defective on that side of the mind in 
respect to which incompleteness has been just ascribed to Goethe. Whewell 
refers the errors of Aristotle, not to a neglect of facts, but to “a negiect of 
the idea appropriate to the facts; the idea of Mechanical cause, which is 
Force, and the substitution of vague or inapplicable notions, involving only 
