Charles Scott Sherrington (1857–1952)

I had seen a few sources represent Goethe’s «Zur Farbenlehre» as a rebuttal to Newton’s Opticks―the poetic view of nature v. the mathematical-mechanical―so I picked up this 50-page pamphlet based on a lecture delivered at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford, in March 1942. (Did they really have time for this during the war?!). Sir Charles Sherrington, O.M., G.B.E., P.R.S. was apparently the highfalutin histologist-bacteriologist of his day, so I resolved to hear what he had to say.

Sherrington begins by gently mocking Goethe (‘the episode of Goethe v. the prism’) and the poet’s ‘almost willful inability to enter into the physicist’s point of view.’ We are to understand that Goethe was in no way imbued with ‘the scientific temperament.’ He favored the naked eye over experimentation by apparatus, and was distrustful of mathematics. The problem of colour, for Goethe, was as much psychical as it was physical. Expanding the discussion into Goethe’s work in morphology and botany, Sherrington has the poet-philosopher wonder aloud whether a plausible guess is the same thing as an observation of fact. Goethe mused on the Platonic ideas in the mind of the creative spirit, and on efficient causes and a ‘law’ of the ‘correlation of parts’ which became the theme of a poem which Sherrington quotes in full, in the original German. Alas, while I have great respect for poetry with lots of hard consonants and random capitalizations, I can’t read it. Sherrington’s response to the poem gives a hint as to how much fun the lecture must have been to hear, though. ‘These verses we may think do not fully admit of poetry. That Goethe himself should so misjudge the theme is poignant evidence of how greatly in earnest he was about it.’ Oof. Let it be known that Sherrington’s mocking of Goethe and the critique of «Zur Farbenlehre» gets perilously close to the annoying kind of scientism. Goethe’s treatise on the allegorical, symbolic, and mythical use of colour was more than a century out of date, says our royal histologist. Goethe ‘completely failed to understand’ Newton’s fundamentally new point of view. Were it not for his poetry, we would not trouble about Goethe’s science, says Sherrington, because as science it is not important. What is important, however, is the light that his science throws on Goethe the poet, and on his conception of Nature. Well, then. Let’s see.

Sherrington’s view of Goethe’s view of Nature is ambivalent, maybe because Sherrington decides to play both scientist and literary critic. Goethe appears not to have thought much about evolution or heredity (the poet as bad scientist), but Goethe did acknowledge ‘Heaven’s great gift of inequality’ which ‘allows the betterment of our kind and of the Earth’ (good science, as 'we can now control the very particles of life on whose reactions depend the differences among men.’ Wait. Is Sherrington endorsing genetic research, or eugenics?) Goethe’s poetry personified ‘types’ (‘a chronic ailment in European poetry’), was lacking in humour (the British kind, with an extra ‘u’), and utilized concepts of Space and Time that bore little resemblance to what Einstein would uncover a hundred year hence(!) Goethe could not tell a lark from a sparrow, he thought of himself as partly an imaginary character, and ‘moods passed over him like brightness and shadow over a spring meadow.’ That sounds a lot like most of the people I know. Goethe ‘would revise his judgments and then praise both sides.’ Is that a criticism, Charles, O.M.? ‘Sibylline equivocality never entered him.’ That’s my favorite sentence of the whole speech. I would like to be able to say that in front of a room full of people just once.

In the last few pages Sherrington seems to arrive at some sympathy toward the poet's idiosyncratic celebration of Nature, and attributes to Goethe qualities and tendencies that make him all the more admirable. He practiced a kind of pantheistic altruism, he had ‘every kind of knowledge but that which earns bread,’ and he always had an enthusiasm ready. Klingt gut für mich, vorzüglichsten Ritter.… (altro)