III - From Alchemy to Science

Summary

The development of Goethe's thought away from alchemy and towards science was a gradual one. While he certainly abandoned his attempts at finding the Philosophers' Stone he made no abrupt break, and his science grows naturally out of his earlier study.

When Herder met Goethe in Strasbourg in the September of 1770 the latter was still engaged in his occult pursuits. ‘Chemistry’, as he wrote to Fräulein von Klettenberg, was still his ‘secret love’. But Herder's sharp criticisms drove them more and more into hiding: Goethe suffered severely from his friend's well-aimed attacks on his lack of thoroughness and his dilettantism, and his dreams of alchemy would have provided a very broad target. He was careful therefore to reveal as little as possible of his more imaginative flights. His plans for dramatizing the story of Götz von Berlichingen, as well as Faust, the symbol of his own private hopes, remained a secret. ‘But most of all’, he writes, ‘I hid from Herder my mystical-cabbalistical chemistry and all the things related to it.’ To have spoken of this, he must have felt, would be to lay himself open to ruthless witticisms, against which he felt that he had little defence, at least as far as a reasoned and logical counter-attack was concerned.