Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 17.djvu/421

Rh the idea. He then undertook to carry out his method systematically in a chosen field, and failed so conspicuously as not only to settle the question against him, but to make his failure a landmark of modern intellectual history. The chief interest of the subject is, therefore, by no means the question of the status of Goethe; it is a question of the claims of antagonist methods in the views to be taken of the surrounding world.

The view ineffectually maintained by Goethe by no means fell with his failure; it had been too long and too firmly established. The poetic and artistic method of regarding Nature was the earliest; and it was inevitable that the mental procedures it involved should become the universal habit and the basis of culture. It was the all-accepted and all-sufficient mode of viewing the natural order. The poet and the painter pictured the world as presented to the senses and the feelings. Philosophy worked out, and theology enforced, the first rude interpretations of natural objects and events, as they were open to the observation of the senses. Literature, of course, embodied those current modes of thought which were occupied merely with the external aspects of things, and such interpretations as were possible with only this surface-knowledge.

This method was satisfactory for many ages; but there at length began to grow up a curiosity or desire to pry into things and see what would come of it. Men began to penetrate beneath the superficial show to the subtiler structures and underworking forces by which all appearance is determined. Thus science arose. It began in dissatisfaction with the shallowness of the knowledge of Nature and the insufficiency of its current explanations; and it began at the outset to devise new means of arriving at truth. Instruments of scrutiny, instruments of analysis, experiment, and dissection, were devised, and, by their diligent application, curious and startling revelations were made of the inner workings, the finer constitution, and the deeper harmonies of the surrounding universe.

This new procedure of science the poets and artists have ever been inclined to resent as a violence and desecration. Accepting Nature as disclosed to the senses, and interpreted by immediate intuitions, they oppose science as a heartless agency, inappreciative of beauty, and destructive of poetry and art. Goethe strongly shared this jealousy of science as an intrusive rival of the great arts that have enriched the life of man. He was not only a representative poet, powerfully dominated by aesthetic feeling and artistic sentiment, but he was also a philosophic thinker, and not without some scientific aptitude, and with these qualifications he was ambitious of becoming the champion of artistic and poetic ideals against the cold and ruthless processes of experimental science. He chose a branch of optics as the field of conflict, and Newton as his antagonist, with what result Professor Tyndall's paper sufficiently indicates. Professor Helmholtz, some years ago, gave a lecture "On Goethe's Scientific Researches," in which he treats his character and labors from the point of view here taken. We subjoin some passages from this instructive discourse:

Goethe, though he exercised his powers in many spheres of intellectual activity, is nevertheless, par excellence, a poet. Now, in poetry, as in every other art, the essential thing is to make the material of the art, be it words, or music, or color, the direct vehicle of an idea. In a perfect work of art, the idea must be present and dominate the whole, almost unknown to the poet himself, not as the result of a long intellectual process, but as inspired by a direct intuition of the inner eye, or by an outburst of excited feeling.

An idea thus embodied in a work of art, and dressed in the garb of reality, does indeed make a vivid impression by appealing directly to the senses, but loses, of course, that universality and that intelligibility which it would have had if presented in the form of an abstract notion. The poet, feeling how