nally construct the most complicated
of all--man--out of the materials of the whole of nature. In thus
creating man anew under the guidance of nature, you penetrate into his
mysterious organism."

And, indeed, as there is a wonderful harmony with nature in Goethe the
poet and the man, so there is the same harmony in Goethe the savant and
the thinker; nay, even science he practised as a poet. As one of the
greatest physicists of our days, Helmholtz, has said of him, "He did not
try to translate nature into abstract conceptions, but takes it as a
complete work of art, which must reveal its contents spontaneously to an
intelligent observer." Goethe never became a thorough experimentalist;
he did not want "to extort the secret from nature by pumps and retorts."
He waited patiently for a voluntary revelation, _i.e._, until he could
surprise that secret by an intuitive glance; for it was his conviction
that if you live intimately with Nature she will sooner or later
disclose her mysteries to you. If you read his _Songs_, his _Werther_,
his _Wahlverwandtschaften_, you feel that extraordinary intimacy--I had
almost said identification--with nature, present everywhere. Werther's
love springs up with the blossom of all nature; he begins to sink and
nears his self-made tomb while autumn, the death of nature, is in the
fields and woods. So does the moon spread her mellow light over his
garden, as "the mild eye of a true friend over his destiny." Never was
there a poet who humanized nature or naturalized human feeling, if I
might say so, to the same degree as Goethe. Now, this same love of
nature he brought into his scientific researches.

He began his studies of nature early, and he began them as he was to
finish them--with geology. Buffon's great views on the revolutions of
the earth had made a deep impression upon him, although he was to end as
the declared adversary of that vulcanism which we can trace already at
the bottom of Buffon's theory--naturally enough, when we think how
uncongenial all violence in society and nature was to him, how he looked
everywhere for slow, uninterrupted evolution. From theoretical study he
had early turned to direct observation; and when his administrative
functions obliged him to survey the mines of the little dukedom, ample
opportunity was offered for positive studies. As early as 1778, in a
paper, _Granite_, he wrote: "I do not fear the reproach that a spirit of
contradiction draws me from the