Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/333

 whose virulence and love of persecution hold each other in perfect equilibrium.

There is a great deal more invective of this kind; but you will probably, and not without sadness, consider this enough. Invective may be a sharp weapon, but over-use blunts its edge. Even when the denunciation is just and true, it is an error of art to indulge in it too long. We not only incur the risk of becoming vapid, but of actually inverting the force of reprobation which we seek to rouse, and of bringing it back by recoil upon ourselves. At suitable intervals, separated from each other by periods of dignified reserve, 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 Goethe, 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 Goethe 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 Goethe mixed himself with Newton. So much for the purely ethical picture. On the scientific side something more is to be said. I do not know whether psychologists have sufficiently taken into account that, as regards intellectual endowment, vast wealth may coexist 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 potentiality, 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 organization no education can repair. Now, the field of science is sufficiently large, and its studies sufficiently varied, to bring to light in the same individual antitheses of endowment like that here indicated.

So far as science is a work of ordering and classification, so far as it consists in the discovery of analogies and resemblances which escape the common eye—of the fundamental identity which often exists among apparently diverse and unrelated things—so far, in short, as it is observational, descriptive, and imaginative, Goethe, had he chosen to make his culture exclusively scientific, might have been without a master, perhaps even without a rival. The instincts and capacities of the poet lend themselves freely to the natural history sciences. But, when we have to deal with stringently physical and mechanical conceptions, such instincts and capacities are out of place. It was in this 