Society is generally amenable to subsidizing science's expensive machinery, which at some point will provide civilization with another advance on the scale of relativity theory, but such heedless optimism can mislead one Line into the notion that the aim of science is to find the 'meaning' of the world. (5) That there must be a meaning seems certain, for otherwise there could be no such a thing as progress, but we must also acknowledge that as science keeps uncovering more and more secrets, it progresses in the way that computations in the infinitesimal calculus keep approaching nearer and nearer to infinity without ever getting there, and we must not assume that progress should seek a (10) final end to the quest for knowledge. The amateur scientist Goethe, though vehemently and mistakenly opposed to Newton's mechanistic model of reality, demonstrated the dangers of his co/league's positivist approach, for though his science was bad science, his scientific writings are not bad philosophy. Goethe demanded that science should (15) always hold to the human scale, opposing the use of the microscope on the grounds that what cannot be seen with the naked eye should not be seen, that what is hidden from us is hidden for a purpose. In this, Goethe was a scandal among scientists, whose first, firm, and necessary principle is that if something can be done, it should he, and his furious denial of Newton was more than (20) merely the bloodshot jealousy of one great mind drawing a bead on another. Goethe's theory of light is wrong insofar as the science of optics is concerned, yet in the expression of his theory Goethe achieves a pitch of poetic intensity that is as persuasive, in its way, as anything Newton did: there is, Goethe suggested, a world beyond the current state of science. (25) At the end of the 19th century, before Einstein, professors were steering students away from physics because they believed little was left undiscovered about the nature of physical reality. As we approach the end of the 20th century, we are still guilty of hubris: probably a Unified Field Theory will be achieved, and will seem for a time, perhaps even as long as the period between (30) Newton's Principia and Einstein's first paper on the theory of relativity, to explain everything but then a Heisenberg or a Gdel will come forward and unravel the entire structure. Einstein correctly remarked more than once how strange and suspicious it is that reality, as we know it, keeps proving itself amenable to the rules of man-made science. Our thought extends only as far as (35) our capacity to express it, and thus what we consider reality is only that stratum of the world that we have the faculties to comprehend. There is a truth that scientists not blinded by hubris, or a cramped imagination, have always acknowledged: that there is no end to the venture. The author discusses Goethe's theories in the second paragraph primarily to do which of the following?