Leonardo da Vinci, who, in addition to his immortal art-creations, was a physicist of high rank, yet he was as such so far ahead of his time that the example can not be cited as evidence that the rise of science conditions also the rise of art. Michael Angelo died on the same day that Galileo was born. In the common eminence of art and science at the beginning of this century we see only a coincidence. Art has since then continued at best at the same height, while science is still careering on its course of irrepressible victory.
The two lines are in fact so different that it is easily to be seen that science can help art and art science only externally. "Nature," said Goethe, addressing Eckermann, without perceiving how sharply his words might be applied to a side of his own scientific efforts—"Nature knows no pastime; she is always true, always earnest, always severe; she is always right, and faults and mistakes are always man's."[1] In order adequately to perceive the correctness of this expression, one must be accustomed, when he applies his own hand to work as an experimenter or observer, to look into the inexorable face of Nature, and, we might almost say, to take upon himself the immense responsibility that is involved in the determination of even the most insignificant fact. What happens at this moment, under these circumstances, will also happen, under the same circumstances, for a negatively endless time, and will likewise happen after a positively endless time; this is the pregnant significance of every rightly interpreted experiment. Only the mathematician, whose work is more nearly allied to that of the experimental investigator than we are used to conceive, can oppose eternally inviolable laws to the same feeling of responsibility. Sworn witnesses before the tribunal of reality, they both strive after knowledge of the world as it is, within the limits imposed upon us by the nature of our intellect. For this painful pressure under which he labors, the investigator is compensated by the knowledge that even the least of his achievements is a step forward above the highest stage reached by his greatest predecessors; that it may contain the germ of immensely important theoretical knowledge and practical achievements, as Wollaston's lines in the spectrum contained the germ of spectrum analysis; that such a prize invites not only the genius raised up by Nature, but also the conscientious industry of the moderately gifted; and that science, bestowing upon the human mind the mastery of Nature, is the ruling organ of civilization: that without it there never has been a true civilization; and that without it civilization, together with art and its works, might any day sink again hopelessly, as they did on the extinction of the ancient world.
- ↑ Gespräche mit Goethe, etc. Leipsic, 1836, vol. ii, p. 68 (1829).
