Post 00465
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Now the Bishop Butler type of mind–the visualizing, idealizing, analogy-loving, literary, and philosophical mind–is shared by a good many people; it is shared by or is characteristic of all the great poets, artists, seers, idealists of the world; it is the humanistic type that sees man everywhere reflected in nature; and is radically different from the strictly scientific type which dehumanizes nature and reduces it to impersonal laws and forces, which distrusts analogy and sentiment and poetry, and clings to a rigid logical method.
This type of mind is bound to have trouble in accepting the physico-chemical theory of the nature and origin of life. It visualizes life, sees it as a distinct force or principle working in and through matter but not of it, super-physical in its origin and psychological in its nature. This is the view Henri Bergson exploits in his “Creative Evolution.” This is the view Kant took when he said, “It is quite certain that we cannot even satisfactorily understand, much less explain, the nature of an organism and its internal forces on purely mechanical principles.” It is the view Goethe took when he said, “Matter can never exist without spirit, nor spirit without matter.”
Tyndall says Goethe was helped by his poetic training in the field of natural history, but hindered as regards the physical and mechanical sciences. “He could not formulate distinct mechanical conceptions; he could not see the force of mechanical reasoning.” His literary culture helped him to a literary interpretation of living nature, but not to a scientific explanation of it; it helped put him in sympathy with living things, and just to that extent barred him from the mechanistic conception of those of pure science. Goethe, like every great poet, saw the universe through the colored medium of his imagination, his emotional and æsthetic nature; in short, through his humanism, and not in the white light of the scientific reason. His contributions to literature were of the first order, but his contributions to science have not taken high rank. He was a “prophet of the soul,” and not a disciple of the scientific understanding.