be induced to publish the comments which he made
to me as I read him the scientific maxims, besides being the best of
introductions to that section of the book, they would form a keen and
clear review of Goethe's scientific achievements, and an emphatic
testimony to his wonderful anticipations of later theories.

Between a maxim, an aphorism, and an apophthegm, and in a more obvious
degree, between these and an adage and a proverb, the etymologist and
the lexicographer may easily find a distinction. But they are, one and
all, fragments of the wisdom of life, treasured up in short, pithy
sentences that state or define some general truth of experience; and
perhaps with an adage and a maxim, enjoin its practice as a matter of
conduct. In the literature of every age there have been writers who,
instead of following a less severe method, thus briefly record the
lessons taught them by a wide view of the doings of men; from the dim,
far-off beginnings of Ptah Hotep the Egyptian to the authors of the
Proverbs of Solomon and the Book of Wisdom, from Theognis and Plutarch
downwards to our own time. They give us the shrewdest of their thoughts,
detached from the facts which gave them birth. But the professed writers
of maxims are not the only or always the best authors of them. There is
no great writer who is not rich in wise sentences; where we have the
advantage of seeing for ourselves the train of thought that induced and
the occasion that called them forth. Terse and pregnant sayings are
scattered innumerably through the pages of the finest poets, the great
orators, philosophers, and historians, wherever they touch the highest
level of truth and insight; be it in the lofty interpretation of life,
the defence of action or policy, the analysis of character and conduct,
or the record of progress; and then it is that large ideas and wide
observations take on imperceptibly the nature of maxim or aphorism,
illumining, like points of light, whole fields of thought and
experience. And the test of their value is that they lose little or
nothing by being deprived of their particular context and presented as
truths of general import. A collection of proverbs, shrewd sayings, and
pointed expressions, taken from the whole range of Greek and Latin
literature, was made by the industry of Erasmus in his great folio of
_Adagia_; and perhaps some future student, as diligent as he, may gather
up the aphoristic wisdom in the writings of modern tim