Hegel—reading weizt for weist—takes the second line as
Too happy, if he can but know the outside of her rind.
Goethe's attack upon a vulgar misuse of the lines belongs to his dispute with the scientists. His verses appeared in 1820 as Heiteres Reimstück at the end of Heft 3 zur Morphologie,—of which the closing section is entitled Freundlicher Zuruf (Werke xxvii. 161), as follows:—
"Ins Innre der Natur,"
O du Philister!—
"Dringt kein erschaffner Geist."
. . . . . . .
"Glückselig! wem sie nur
Die äußre Schale weis't."
Das hör' ich sechzig Jahre wiederholen,
Ich fluche drauf, aber verstohlen:
Sage mir taufend tausendmale:
Alles giebt sie reichlich und gern;
Natur hat weder Stern
Noch Schale,
Alles ist sie mit einem Male.
[The last seven lines may be thus paraphrased in continuation:
I swear—of course but to myself—as rings within my ears
That same old warning o'er and o'er again for sixty years,
And thus a thousand thousand times I answer in my mind:
—With gladsome and ungrudging hand metes nature from her store:
She keeps not back the core,
Nor separates the rind,
But all in each both rind and core has evermore combined.]
P. [254], § 140. Plato and Aristotle: cf. Plato, Phaedrus, 247 A (φθόνoς γὰρ ξω θείον χόρoυ ἴσταται); Timaeus, 29 E; and Aristotle, Metaph. i. 2. 22.
P. [256], § 140. Goethe: Sämmtl. Werke, iii. 203 (Maxime und Reflexionen). Gegen große Vorzüge eines Andern giebt es kein Rettungsmittel als die Liebe. Cf. Schiller to Goethe, 2 July, 1796. 'How vividly I have felt on this occasion ... that against surpassing merit nothing but Love gives liberty' (daß es dem Vortrefflichen gegenüber seine Freiheit giebt als die Liebe).
'Pragmatic.' This word, denoting a meddlesome busybody in older English and sometimes made a vague term of abuse, has been in the present century used in English as it is here employed in German.
According to Polybius, ix. I. 2, the πραγματικὸς τρόπος τῆς ἱστορίας is that which has a directly utilitarian aim. So Kant, Foundation of Metaph. of Ethic (Werke, viii. 41, note): 'A history is pragmatically composed when it renders prudent, i.e. instructs the world how it may secure its advantage better or at least as well as the ages preceding.' Schelling (v. 308) quotes in illustration of pragmatic history-writing the words of Faust to Wagner (Goethe, xi. 26):