results. But he complained of their incompleteness and lack of logical force. What appears to us as the very perfection of Newton's art, and absolutely essential to the purity of the experiments, was regarded by Goethe as needless complication and mere torturing of the light. He spared no pains in making himself master of Newton's data, but he lacked the power of penetrating either their particular significance, or of estimating the force and value of experimental evidence generally.
He will not, he says, shock his readers at the outset by the utterance of a paradox, but he can not withhold the assertion that by experiment nothing can really be proved. Phenomena may be observed and classified; experiments may be accurately executed, and made thus to represent a certain circle of human knowledge; but deductions must be drawn by every man for himself. Opinions of things belong to the individual, and we know only too well that conviction does not depend upon insight, but upon will that man can only assimilate that which is in accordance with his nature, and to which he can yield assent. In knowledge, as in action, says Goethe, prejudice decides all, and prejudice, as its name indicates, is judgment prior to investigation. It is an affirmation or a negation of what corresponds, or is opposed to our own nature. It is the cheerful activity of our living being in its pursuit of truth or of falsehood, as the case may be—of all, in short, with which we feel ourselves to be in harmony.
There can be no doubt that Goethe, in thus philosophizing, dipped his bucket into the well of profound self-knowledge. He was obviously stung to the quick by the neglect of the physicists. He had been the idol of the world, and, accustomed as he was to the incense of praise, he felt sorely that any class of men should treat what he thought important with indifference or contempt. He had, it must be admitted, some ground for skepticism as to the rectitude of scientific judgments, seeing that his researches on morphology met at first no response, though they were afterward lauded by scientific men. His anger against Newton incorporates itself in sharp and bitter sarcasm. Through the whole of Newton's experiments, he says, there runs a display of pedantic accuracy, but how the matter really stands, with Newton's gift of observation, and with his experimental aptitudes, every man possessing eyes and senses may make himself aware. It may, he says, be boldly asked, Where can the man be found, possessing the extraordinary gifts of Newton, who would suffer himself to be deluded by such a hocus pocus if he had not in the first instance willfully deceived himself? Only those who know the strength of self-deception, and the extent to which it sometimes trenches on dishonesty, are in a condition to explain the conduct of Newton, and of Newton's school. "To support his unnatural theory," he continues, "Newton heaps experiment on experiment, fiction upon fiction, seeking to dazzle where he can not convince."
It may be that Goethe is correct in affirming that the will and
