ctive outlook of age, laying greater stress
upon science. His feeling for Nature, which followed an unbroken
course, like his mental development generally, stands alone as a type
of perfectly modern feeling, and yet no one, despite the many
intervening centuries, stood so near both to Homer and to
Shakespeare, and in philosophy to Spinoza.

But because with Goethe poetry and philosophy were one, his pantheism
is full of life and poetic vision, whilst that of the wise man of
Amsterdam is severely mathematical and abstract. And the postulate of
this pantheism was sympathy, harmony between Nature and the inner
life. He felt himself a part of the power which upholds and
encompasses the world. Nature became his God, love of her his
religion. In his youth, in the period of _Werther, Ganymede_, and the
first part of _Faust_, this pantheism was a nameless, unquenchable
aspiration towards the divine--for wings to reach, like the rays of
light, to unmeasured heights; as he said in the Swiss mountains,
'Into the limitless spaces of the air, to soar over abysses, and let
him down upon inaccessible rocks.'

After the Italian journeys science took the lead, the student of
Nature supplanted the lover, even his symbolism took a more abstract
and realistic form. But he never, even in old age, lost his love for
the beauties of Nature, and, holding to Spinoza's fundamental ideas
of the unchangeableness and eternity of Nature's laws, and the
oneness of the Cosmos, he sought to think it out and base it upon
scientific grounds, through the unbroken succession of animal and
vegetable forms of life, the uniform 'formation and transformation of
all organic Nature.' He wrote to Frau von Stein: 'I cannot express to
you how legible the book of Nature is growing to me; my long spelling
out has helped me. It takes effect now all of a sudden; my quiet
delight is inexpressible; I find much that is new, but nothing that
is unexpected--everything fits in and conforms, because I have no
system, and care for nothing but truth for its own sake. Soon
everything about living things will be clear to me.'[13]

Poetic and scientific intuition were simultaneous with him, and their
common bond was pantheism. This pantheism marked an epoch in the
history of feeling. For Goethe not only transformed the unreal
feeling of his day into real, described scenery, and inspired it with
human feeling, and deciphered the beauty of the Alps, as no one else
had done, Rouss