Goethe occupied a position that often placed him closer to historical events than he might have liked and forced him to come to terms with them, not only personally, but above all for the sake of Duke Carl August (1757-1828) and the small German state of Saxe-Weimar-Eisenach that Goethe served throughout his adult life. Thus Goethe was not just a man of letters, but also a man of affairs; he was acquainted with, met - not least through his regular sojourns at the Bohemian spas - or had dealings with an impressive number of the leading players of his age ranging from Prussian kings and statesmen to Napoleon Bonaparte, Czar Alexander I of Russia and Prince Metternich, the architect of Restoration Europe.

Faust has been seen as the paradigmatic text of modernity almost since its conception. By 1836 Karl Gutzkow was claiming that Goethe was 'set by the gods as a boundary-stone to mark where the past ends and modernity begins', while for Matthew Arnold he was the great manifestation of the modern spirit. Innumerable critics have identified Goethe's most famous work as the beginning of this or that tradition. Whether or not one fully agrees with these characterizations, Faust is undeniably one of those rare works that capture some major turning point in our history. Composed over six decades, from 1773 to 1832, Faust comprehends far-reaching changes in philosophy, science, political and economic organization, industrialization and technology that might best be summarized as Europe's confrontation with the impact of secularization. Europe entered the eighteenth century with institutions and structures still defined in terms of a cosmos ordered by a divine principle; but increasingly the universe was felt to operate on its own and sometimes seemed entirely the product of natural processes.

Johann Wolfgang Goethe (1749-1832) was the first German writer of unquestioned European stature. And no other writer of his stature has his range and diversity. Author at the age of twenty-five of the first German international bestseller, Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sorrows of Young Werther), his impact on the literary scene at home and beyond Germany's borders was immense. Throughout his long productive life (he finished the second part of Faust only months before his death in 1832) he continued to surprise his contemporaries with the freshness and unexpected new departure of each work. He was a supreme lyric poet who also produced masterpieces in the genres of drama, prose fiction and verse epic. He was a serious natural scientist, an art critic and art historian as well as a painter, a chronicler of his own life and times, a theatre director and actor, a Privy Councillor and administrator. He conducted a vast international correspondence and was acquainted and had dealings with many of the prominent political players of the time. His collected works, the amount known about his life, the amount written about it and about his works are all huge. While this volume cannot begin to do justice to its subject, it aims to give the reader approaching Goethe for the first time some sense of the character of his work, some impression of his achievement, and some awareness of and orientation in the critical debates that have raged and still rage over aspects of his work and status.

For much of his adult life, Goethe had a dominant position in the Republic of Letters in Germany as well as abroad. No one who amounted to anything, whether it was Kleist or Heine, Scott or Byron, Musset or Saint-Beuve, Mazzini or Pushkin, could possibly bypass him and his work. Admirers and opponents alike would agree on one point: 'He disposes of the poetic world, like a conqueror of the real earth.' Confronted with his monumental stature and output, they took a position either in favour of Goethe or against him, sometimes even switching sides in the course of their careers. As a result, Goethe became a controversial figure both for poets and critics, for Germans as well as for Europeans. But what has been his enduring impact?

By the end of his life, Goethe felt less accepted by German than by European contemporaries, who between 1827 and 1831 not only sent him birthday gifts (medallions and books) from Paris, Moscow, and Scotland (Carlyle in 1831), but also published three reviews of his ‘Helena’ tragedy (Faust II, Act iii) in the same year (The Foreign Review, Edinburgh; Le Globe, Paris; The Moscow Messenger, 1828). Goethe was delighted, since this lively response seemed to confirm his venture to promote Weltliteratur (world literature) as a network of communication among intellectuals and peoples across national frontiers. For him Weltliteratur was neither the sum of all national literatures nor the ever increasing canon of world masterpieces, rather he conceived of it as a dynamic process of rapprochement among European nations – above all Britain, France and Germany – with the goal of breaking down the walls of national prejudices that hampered peaceful coexistence in the wake of the Napoleonic Wars.

Even aged sixteen Goethe strove for authority. He may not have achieved the sublime degree of autoritas he envisaged as a Leipzig fresher in 1765 - that of a German university professor. But among his peers he quickly acquired unparalleled poetic authority. After the publication of his first major innovative works, the Shakespearean patriotic drama Götz von Berlichingen (1773) and the Rousseauesque sentimental novel Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774), Goethe was lionized. In his Pandaemonium Germanicum (c. 1775) Jakob Michael Reinhold Lenz portrayed Goethe atop the German Pantheon, surrounded by adoring critics whom he must shake off like flies. Johann Caspar Lavater's Physiognomische Fragmente (Physiognomical fragments, 1775-8) presented Goethe for page after page as a divine poetic genius. This poetic charisma remained undiminished as generations and literary paradigms passed. Twenty years on, in Über die asthetische Erziehung des Menschen (On the Aesthetic Education of Humanity, 1795), Friedrich Schiller painted Goethe's portrait as the model classical poet. Such admiration also stretched across literary ideologies. In 1798 the leading early German Romantic Friedrich Schlegel asserted that Goethe's classical novel Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, 1795-6) represented one of the age's three fundamental tendencies).

When Goethe first drew up a schematic diagram for his planned autobiography in October 1809, he had just completed work on his novel Die Wahlverwandtschaften (Elective Affinities), whose formal elegance contrasts all the more glaringly with the moral and societal crisis depicted therein. In the years since the death of Schiller in 1805, Goethe had witnessed the dissolution of the Holy Roman Empire, the defeat of Prussia, and the reorganization of the political map of Europe by Napoleon. His mother had died in 1808, removing yet another link to his childhood and youth. Under these conditions he undertook the re-examination of his life and career as a writer from the vantage point of a sixty-year-old interested in imbuing individual stages of his life with historical significance.

It is in this context that the title Aus meinem Leben: Dichtung und Wahrheit (From my Life: Poetry and Truth, 1811–33) assumes its meaning: while not neglecting factual information (Wahrheit), Goethe is above all concerned with the refashioning and interpretation of his recollections (Dichtung). In the process, the specific events and individuals depicted in Goethe’s autobiographical writings become paradigmatic not only of important stages in the individual development of the poet, but also of significant moments in the social, cultural, religious and literary life of German-speaking Europe.

Goethe left a rich and heterogeneous body of work in the dramatic genre. Besides the five major dramas (Götz von Berlichingen, Egmont, Iphigenie auf Tauris, Torquato Tasso and Faust), various completed works survive of differing style, length and quality, as well as a large number of fragments and sketches. But even if we isolate the major dramas, we are again struck by their diversity. To be sure, while Faust (which is treated separately in this volume) is unique and incommensurable, Götz and Egmont are both historical plays written in prose, while Iphigenie and Tasso are both written in blank verse. A closer examination will show, however, that each work has its own unique features. For Goethe each dramatic work represented a fresh challenge to discover the appropriate vehicle for his immediate needs. In view of this diversity I shall not confine myself here to the small canon of major works, as some other critics have done, but shall try instead to do justice to the breadth of Goethe's remarkable body of work in this genre.

Isaac Newton's Observations upon the Prophecies of Daniel, and the Apocalypse of St. John, prepared for the press from his manuscripts by his nephew Benjamin Smith, was published in two editions in London and Dublin in 1733. According to Richard S. Westfall, Newton's finest twentieth-century biographer, the author “had cleansed his Observations” and his heirs “could publish the manuscript without concern.” Yet one might be permitted to wonder whether either the actual or the intended reception of Newton's posthumous work was as uncontroversial as it has seemed to late twentienth-century eyes. The book was dedicated to Peter King, baron of Ockham, the lord chancellor, who had defended Newton's sometime disciple, William Whiston, during his trial for heresy in July 1713. Although Whiston later fell out with King, he nevertheless continued to maintain that King's youthful writings on the primitive Church supported the Arian position for which he had himself been condemned. King was also the dedicatee of other works of dubious theological orthodoxy, such as Daniel Mace's attempted revision of the New Testament.

The opposition between analytical and synthetic proof methods has an intriguing and complex role in the history of Western mathematics. In Antiquity analytical method (in brief, analysis) was conceived of as a method of discovery, or problem solving: it starts from what is sought as if it had already been achieved, and, working step by step backwards, it eventually arrives at what is known. This and similar rather vague definitions were aimed at describing in a general way a whole apparatus of geometric problem solving procedures developed by the Greeks. Synthesis goes the other way round: it starts from what is known and, working through the consequences, it arrives at what is sought. The axiomatic and deductive structure of Euclid's Elements was the model of the synthetic method of proof. Analysis (or resolutio) was often thought of as a method of discovery preliminary to the synthesis (or compositio), which, reversing the steps of the analytical procedure, achieves the true scientific demonstration. Analysis was thus the working tool of the geometer, but it was with synthesis that one could demonstrate things in an indisputable way. In the Middle Ages this pattern of definitions became bound up with the philosophical and logical tradition. A question which was often raised concerned the relationship between the mathematical proof methods and other accepted forms of deductive proof, typically those codified in Aristotle's Organon.

INTRODUCTION

The first edition of Isaac Newton's Principia was published in 1687, followed by a second edition in 1713 and a third in 1726, the year before he died. The Principia is universally held to have been a major turning point in natural philosophy in the seventeenth century. That turning point is clearly reflected in the comparison of the title of Descartes's 1644 Principles of Philosophy with the title of Newton's Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Even though both men were noted mathematicians, Newton's book is distinguished from that of Descartes by virtue of being a mathematical description of nature. In the General Scholium of the second edition Newton sets out the difference quite clearly: “But hitherto I have not been able to discover the cause of those properties of gravity from phenomena, and I frame no hypotheses . . . And to us it is enough, that gravity does exist, and acts according to the [mathematical] laws which we have explained.” Although Newton was strongly influenced by the Cartesian mechanical philosophy during the first two decades of his scholarly work, he nevertheless expressed himself analytically from the very beginning of his work in 1664. By 1684, however, he had rejected Cartesian mechanical explanations for gravity, and in the Principia he emphasized the analytical expression of the inversesquare law for gravity. The final impetus for that rejection came from Newton's correspondence in 1679 with Robert Hooke, which led Newton to derive Kepler's area law as a geometrical measure of time to employ in analyzing orbital motion. That same correspondence has shown that Newton's later work is an extension, not a revision, of his earlier work.

VARIETIES OF FORCE IN THE PRINCIPIA

Newton's physics is based on two fundamental concepts: mass and force. In the Principia Newton explores the properties of several types of force. The most important of these are the forces that produce accelerations or changes in the state of motion or of rest in bodies. In Definition 4 of the Principia, Newton separates these into three principal categories: impact or percussion, pressure, and centripetal force. In the Principia, Newton mentions other types of forces, including (in Book 2) the forces with which fluids resist motions through them. Of a different sort is Newton's “force of inertia,” which is neither an accelerative force nor a static force and is not, properly speaking in the context of dynamics, a force at all.

The structure of Newton’s Principia follows a classical pattern: definitions and axioms, followed by the statement of propositions and their demonstrations. Newton’s treatise differs, however, from classical (or Greek) geometry in two respects. First, there is a constant appeal to the method of limits – Newton’s “first and ultimate ratios,” as set forth in Book 1, Section 1. Second, the validity of propositions is tied to evidence of experiment and critical observation.

In the demonstrations in the Principia, Newton generally proceeds by establishing a series of proportions from a geometric configuration. He then allows one or more of the parameters to be diminished without limit, thereby obtaining a limiting (“ultimate”) value of the geometric ratio. It is in the limit that Newton’s proofs are valid.

After his first optical publications in 1672 Newton was identified by his contemporaries and later generations as a supporter of the corpuscular or emission theory of light, in which light is assumed to consist of corpuscles, or atoms, emitted from a luminous source such as the Sun. While it is true that Newton believed in a corpuscular theory, utilized it in developing many of his optical experiments and theories, and argued vigorously against the wave theory of light, he never believed that it was a demonstrated scientific truth and considered it to be only a probable hypothesis. This distinction explains why, for example, he never set forth a synthetic account of the emission theory and eschewed it in his public accounts of his scientific theories. In order to understand Newton's advocacy and use of atomism in his optics it is necessary to understand his views on hypotheses and certainty in science.

HYPOTHESES IN NEWTON’S SCIENCE

From the beginning of his scientific career Newton was concerned with establishing a new, more certain science to replace contemporary science, which he felt was rife with “conjectures and probabilities.” He believed that he could establish a more certain science both by developing mathematical theories and by basing his theories on experimentally discovered properties. To establish a more certain science, Newton insisted that one must “not mingle conjectures with certainties.”

THE INTELLECTUAL BACKGROUND OF A NATURAL PHILOSOPHER OF THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY

Newton's theological manuscripts are concerned principally with two subjects: the interpretation of the prophecies of the Apocalypse and Daniel, and the history of the early Church. These two subjects are linked, but it was as a consequence of his interpretation of the Apocalypse that Newton undertook his study of the history of the Church. The study of prophetic literature was firmly rooted in Cambridge, where this subject was taught by Joseph Mede, author of a Clavis Apocalyptica (or Key to the Apocalypse), a work much used by Newton.

Newton’s interest in the prophecies is already documented in the “Quaestiones” of the Trinity Notebook (1664–5). In “Of Earth” (c. 1664) Newton made deductions about physics, “in rerum natura,” directly from the Scriptures: the final conflagration of the earth, and the probable succession of worlds. This last affirmation was supported by a passage of the Book of Revelation which referred to days and nights after the Last Judgment, which would have made no sense had the world finished for ever. In “Of the Creation” (c. 1664) Newton made use of a passage from Genesis to prove that God had created time. From these entries it is evident that Newton used biblical texts to determine the truth of a philosophical proposition. Strange or ingenuous as this approach of Newton’s might seem, given that the trial and condemnation of Galileo had shown the difficulty of reconciling philosophy and religion, it was one he maintained in subsequent years.

INTRODUCTION: PHILOSOPHICAL CONTROVERSY OVER NEWTON’S IDEAS OF SPACE, TIME, AND MOTION

Newton's concepts of “absolute space,” “absolute time,” and “absolute motion” met with serious objections from such philosophical contemporaries as Huygens, Leibniz, and Berkeley. Among philosophers of the early twentieth century, after the advent of Special and General Relativity, the objections bordered on scorn: Newton's concepts were not only lately outmoded, but they were also epistemologically inherently defective, empirically unfounded - concepts not scientific at all, but “metaphysical,” in so far as science is concerned precisely with “sensible measures” rather than obscure notions of what is “absolute.” The prevailing idea was that Einstein had established not only a new theory of space and time, but a deeper philosophical viewpoint on space and time in general. From this viewpoint, space, time, and motion are essentially relative, and to call them absolute was an elementary philosophical error. As Einstein put it, General Relativity had taken from space and time “the last remnant of physical objectivity.”

The philosophical motivation for this viewpoint seems obvious. Space cannot be observed; all that we can observe is the relative displacement of observable things. Therefore, if we observe two bodies in relative motion, to say that one of them is “really” moving, or that it is moving “relative to absolute space,” is to pass beyond the bounds of empirical science. If we wish to decide which bodies are moving, we have to construct a frame of reference – that is, we must designate some reference-points to be fixed, and compare the motions of other bodies to these.

Defending “Berenice,” in a letter to Thomas White, Poe confesses that the tale's “subject is by far too horrible” yet asserts that the “history of all Magazines shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in nature - to Berenice.” This nature consists of “the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.” Poe justifies such work: to “be appreciated you must be read, and these things are invariably sought after with avidity.” While Poe couches his economic interest within assertions about originality and careful style and also by noting that “some very high names valued themselves principally upon this species of literature,” he concludes the letter by stating that the marketplace rather than the critic is the final arbiter: “The effect - if any -” he writes, “will be estimated better by the circulation of the Magazine than by any comments upon its contents.” Elevating economic success over good taste, Poe demonstrates early in his career his desire to master the literary marketplace and his awareness that manipulating its conventions offered the key to such mastery.

The aspect of Newton's Principia that has provoked the most controversy within the philosophy of science, other than his invocation of absolute space, time, and motion, has been his claim to have “deduced” the law of universal gravity from phenomena of orbital motion. In particular, a tradition that began with Pierre Duhem and continued with Karl Popper and then Imre Lakatos has argued that this claim is at best misleading (Duhem) and at worst a subterfuge (Lakatos). Among other reasons they have advanced against any such deduction is the objection that no deduction from consistent premises can yield a conclusion that entails one or more of these premises is false; yet one consequence of the law of universal gravity is that all the orbital phenomena from which Newton proceeds in his supposed deduction are, strictly, false. Duhem, Popper, and Lakatos insist, to the contrary, that only a hypothetico-deductive construal of Newton's evidence for universal gravity makes sense, Newton's outspoken objections to hypothetico-deductive evidence notwithstanding. More recently, Clark Glymour has offered a “bootstrapping” construal of Newton's evidence, proposing that it captures the logical force of the reasoning for universal gravitation in the Principia better than a straight-forward hypothetico-deductive construal can. Glymour too, however, sees no way around concluding that some of what Newton seems to think he is doing cannot be correct.

One issue this raises is understanding the reasoning Newton offers in arriving at the law of universal gravity and describes as a “deduction” from phenomena. Another is the extent to which such reasoning is cogent and illuminates scientific method. The simplest way to respond to these questions is to proceed step-by-step through Newton’s reasoning.

Many poets who have commented on Poe's verse have expressed amazement regarding the relative paucity of his poetic output in relation to his status as a great poet. William Carlos Williams observed that though Poe is known as a poet, “there are but five poems, possibly three.” In his essay, “From Poe to Valèry,” T. S. Eliot noted, “He wrote very few poems, and of those few only half a dozen have had a great success: but those few are as well known to as large a number of people, are as well remembered by everybody, as any poems ever written.” Daniel Hoffman has called Poe's poetic oeuvre “one of the teeniest bodies of verse of any poet the world has applauded for over a century.” In his sonnet, “For a Copy of Poe's Poems,” Edward Arlington Robinson eloquently characterized Poe's poetic output as “wonder-songs, fantastically few.” Some have their special favorites - H.D., who named Poe her “favorite among American writers,” preferred “To Helen”; William Carlos Williams, “To One in Paradise”; Robert Pinsky, “Fairy-Land” - yet many agree that Poe's two finest poems are “The Raven” and “Ulalume.”