By this reminder Eddington shows how far science has reconciled itself to the philosophic scepticism at which man's thinking had arrived in the days of Hume. In so far as the above remark was intended to be a consolation for the bewildered student, it is poor comfort in the light of the actions which science has let loose with the help of those unknown entities. For it is just this resignation of human thought which renders it unable to cope with the flood of phenomena springing from the sub-material realm of nature, and has allowed scientific research to outrun scientific understanding. 1 E. du Bois-Raymond: Investigations into Animal Electricity (1884). Galvani published his discovery when the French Revolution had reached its zenith and Napoleon was climbing to power. 2 The above account follows A. J. von Oettingen's edition of Galvani's monograph, De viribus electricitatis in motu musculari. 3 For what follows see The Life of Sir William Crookes, by E. E. Fournier D'Albe (London, 1923). 4 Eddington's italics. See also, in this respect, Professor White head's criticism of the hypothetical picture of the electron and its behaviour. PART II Goetheanism - Whence and Whither? CHAPTER V The Adventure of Reason In 1790, a year before Galvani's monograph, Concerning the Forces of Electricity, appeared, Goethe published his Metamorphosis of Plants, which represents the first step towards the practical overcoming of the limitations of the onlooker-consciousness in science. Goethe's paper was not destined to raise such a storm as soon followed Galvani's publication. And yet the fruit of Goethe's endeavours is not less significant than Galvani's discovery, for the progress of mankind. For in Goethe's achievement lay the seed of that form of knowing which man requires, if in the age of the electrification of civilization he is to remain master of his existence. * Among the essays in which Goethe in later years gave out some of the results of his scientific observation in axiomatic form, is one called 'Intuitive Judgment' ('Anschauende Urteilskraft'), in which he maintains that he has achieved in practice what Kant had declared to be for ever beyond the scope of the human mind. Goethe refers to a passage in the Critique of Judgment, where Kant defines the limits of human cognitional powers as he had observed them in his study of the peculiar nature of the human reason. We must first go briefly into Kant's own exposition of the matter.1