ard, under which growth takes place; he
depicts these in their advent, their collisions, their interplay, their
result.

A spiritual physiology we may name it. He gives not merely the typical
form, but also the working processes, and the _type_ of these. Nor does
he merely enumerate and describe these, after the manner of science, but
pictures them in their total action and final unity. Of such a work,
wrought out with so much of penetration and power, one can speak coolly
enough only by effort.

But the whole is not yet said. Not only does he delineate the idea of
growth in man, but he assumes this as the central use and meaning of the
world. "Positive philosophy" will groan. Give it the smelling-bottle,
and leave it. Goethe does not deign it even a denial; without pausing to
say, he sovereignly assumes, that Nature, as her supreme function, is
the school-mistress of man. For the results enshrined in his spirit,
suns shine, worlds wheel, and systems "move in mystic dance, not without
song." Through the long toil out of chaos to orderly completion and
green fertility, Nature bore in her heart one constant, inspiring
hope,--at last to educate a man. To this end are all times and seasons;
to this end are government, property, labor, rest, pain, and peace; the
world of things and the world of events alike draw meekly near to the
crescent soul, and tender to it their total result, saying,--"In thee,
only in thee, do we come at length to use."

This, then, is the task at which Goethe toiled for many an earnest year.
He will read through world to man, and through all man's fortunes,
inward and outward, to the complete constitution and perfect
architectures of his spirit. Let him succeed in that, and the word of
words for our century and for many centuries is spoken. "Positive
philosophy," with complacent sciolism, may still coldly asseverate that
the world is a dead congeries of "laws," into whose realm man is cast to
take pot-luck in the universe; but we shall know better. The worldling
may still find all good and all evil in the mere fortunes of man; we
shall see beyond these. The fatalist may persist in regarding limits and
conditions as the all in all of life; we shall see them as a foothold
for growth. Once that the spirit of man appears as the final recipient
and vessel of uses, the orderly emptiness of world-law is filled with a
meaning, while the wild welter of man's fortunes and the rigid fixity of
his conditions