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 aesthetic 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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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