1074
PARTISAN REVIEW
it shoots. Yet we cannot avoid the mistake, because we always have the
two associated in our minds and so bring them together.
A note on research: We have to believe that the incomprehensible
is comprehensible; otherwise we should stop searching.
A note on originality: To equate ourselves with objects
in extenso
is
to learn; to grasp them in depth is to create.
A note on theory and practice: The false has the advantage that
you can always gossip about it; the truth has to be acted on at once or it
isn't there.
A note on science: Knowledge consists in recognizing what to dis–
tinguish; science consists in recognizing what not to distinguish.
A note on the transmigration of souls: The fairest metempsychosis is
when we see ourselves emerge in another.
A note on society: Intelligent people are always the best cyclo–
paedias.
Finally a note for students: Strictly speaking we only know when
we know little; doubt grows with knowledge.
It will be evident from the nature of these aphorisms, of which
we have hundreds in prose and verse, that if we approach Goethe in–
tellectually we find in him the same tentative humanity that we find in
his poetry. These are not the utterances of a deity but of one like our–
selves who is feeling his way and sensing his shortcomings. To mytho–
logize at this point would be absurd. But it is not the purpose of this
essay to make Goethe out to be less than he was. When we .asked
what rivals he had in lyrical poetry, for power and duration to–
gether, names at least came to mind. But if we ask now what others
have enjoyed both the poetic and the philosophical gifts-or, what
amounts to the same thing in his case, the lyrical and the scientific–
and again at this pitch and for this length of time, the names are
fewer. There are questions that it is useful to ask and not answer
and this may be one of them, history being not a contest but a process
and Goethe part of the process. It is enough to say that when we
ask the question we begin to realize why in 1949 we have a bicenten–
ary
to celebrate.
What is more profitable to observe is the way in which Goethe's
two main activities interact with one another, the poetic modifying
the scientific and the scientific the poetic. The interaction was facili–
tated in his case because making poetry was not for him the separate
faculty that it sometimes seems to be but was simply an extension of
the general experience that he brought to
be~r
on everything he did,
