Thanks for welcoming me and your comments. Just a point: Goethe lived in an era where, still, being a cultivated mind meant that one needed to have a spheric knowledge about literary everything: from music, powetry, philosophy and the arts, to physics, biology, optics, chemistry, mathematics, history, etc, etc. I would more characterize him as a polymath - one of the last of this kind - than bearely a scientist.
In our time of ultimate specialization and minimum general knowledge and cultivation, polymaths are an extinct species, yet, till the middle of the twentienth century this was the only category that distinguished a really cultivated person than all the rest. Unfortunately, in our times Kenneth Boulding's fears about lack of substantial wisdom among ultimately specialized people has become a reality. For Boulding's fears check on "General System Theory - The Skeleton of Science" (1956).
