Lecture I

To the words which our friend Dr. Stein has kindly been recalling, I may add one more. It was in the early nineties. The Frankfurter Freier Hochstift had invited me to speak on Goethe's work in Science. I then said in introduction that I should mainly confine myself to his work in the organic Sciences. For to carry Goethe's world-conception into our physical and chemical ideas, was as yet quite impossible. Through all that lives and works in the Physics and Chemistry of today, our scientists are fated in regard, whatever takes its start from Goethe in this realm, as being almost unintelligible from their point of view. Thus, I opined, we shall have to wait till physicists and chemists will have witnessed—by their own researches—a kind of “reductio ad absurdum” of the existing theoretic structure of their Science. Then and then only will Goethe's outlook come into its own, also in this domain.