18. Thoughts on Goethe's Literary Estate

Whoever devotes himself in a one-sided way merely to thinking, to the development of our conceptual faculty, his scientific views are empty, devoid of content, they bear the character of the superfluous, because they flee the very area into whose riddle they are supposed to introduce us; He who trusts only in the senses, who seeks nothing but what they deliver to him, suffers from spiritual blindness; he gropes around at the objects without knowing the thread that leads him into the interior, where the apparent lack of rules reveals itself to him as lawful order. For Goethe, the true scientific spirit manifests itself in the fact that it continually alternates between sensual perception and thinking reflection. Just as inhalation and exhalation sustain life, so the to and fro movement of the mind between spreading out over the mass of the sensory world and drawing it back to the lawful sources of this multiplicity sustains proper research. Indeed, all scientific activity is ultimately only comprehensible to Goethe as such a vital human activity. Theories and hypotheses are dead in themselves; they only gain life when they dominate the mind like systole and diastole.[^1] Goethe is not concerned with the results, but with coming closer to creative nature through the living power of the spirit. This cannot be achieved by those who are content with finished, dead knowledge, but only by those who creatively bring this dead material to life within themselves and thus bring forth within that which, apart from themselves, nature can become. For Goethe, the highest thing is not what man is able to gather from the world, but how he comes to terms with it in order to fill his spirit with true-to-life world content.