ence. The perversion of German science under the name of natural philosophy at the beginning of the century was as much of Bathetic as of metaphysical origin, and even Goethe's scientific efforts had the same background. This artistic comprehension of the problems of Nature is defective because it is satisfied to stop with the finely rounded figures, and does not press onward to the causal connections of the fact, to the limits of our understanding. It suffices, where it is concerned with the perceptions of the resemblances of organic forms with plastic fancies, as in the plant stem or the vertebrate skeleton; it fails when, as in the theory of colors, instead of mathematically and physically analyzing, it satisfies itself with the contemplation of presumptively original phenomena. It was reserved for Herr von Brücke to trace the colors of dark media, on which Goethe based his Farbenlehre, and which to this day spread confusion instead of clearness in many German heads, by the aid of the undulatory theory to its true source. The difference between artistic and scientific treatment is prominently set forth in this incident.[1]
Yet it should not be said that artistic feeling may not be of use to the theoretical naturalist. There is an aesthetic of research which strives to impart mechanical beauty in the sense in which we have defined it to an experiment; and the experimenter will not regret having responded as far as possible to its demands. At the transition-line between the literary and the scientific period of a nation's civilization, there rises, under the influence of the declining and that of the ascending genius, a tendency to a more vivid representation of natural phenomena, as is illustrated in France by Buffon and Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, and in Germany by Alexander von Humboldt, in whom it continued vital till extreme age. In this sense, as I have once said here and set it forth as a desirable end, a strictly scientific treatise may under a tasteful hand become an art-work like a novel,[2] The attainment of perfection in this direction will reward the naturalist for the labor, for it affords the best means of proving the faultless accuracy of the chain of reasoning comprehending the results of his observations. And in examples of this kind of beauty, which often flows unsought and unconsciously through the pen of talent, no lack will be found in our Leibnitz.—Translated for The Popular Science Monthly from the Deutsche Rundschau.
