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GA001_c01

September 1925

Goethean Science

Dornach

On August 18, 1787, Goethe wrote to Knebel from Italy: “To judge by the plants and fish I have seen in Naples and Sicily, I would, if I were ten years younger, be very tempted to make a trip to India, not in order to discover something new, but in order to contemplate in my own way what has already been discovered .” In these words is to be found the point of view from which we have to look at Goethe's scientific works. With him it is never a matter of discovering new facts, but rather of opening up a new point of view , of looking at nature in a particular way. It is true that Goethe made a number of great single discoveries, such as the intermaxillary bone, the vertebral theory of the skull in osteology, the common identity of all plant organs with the leaf in botany, etc. But we have to regard as the life and soul of all these individual cases the magnificent view of nature by which they are carried; in the study of organisms we have to fix our attention above all on a magnificent discovery that overshadows everything else: that of the being or nature of the organism itself . Goethe has set forth the principle by which an organism is what it presents itself to be; he sets forth the causes whose results appear to us in the manifestations of life; he sets forth, in fact, everything we can ask about the manifestations of life from a point of view concerned with principles. 1 Whoever declares from the very beginning that such a goal is unattainable will never arrive at an understanding of the Goethean views of nature; on the other hand, whoever undertakes to study them without preconceptions, and leaves this question open, will certainly answer it affirmatively at the end. Doubts could very well arise for many a person through several remarks Goethe himself made, such as the following one, for example: “... without presuming to want to discover the primal mainsprings of nature's workings , we would have directed our attention to the manifestation of the forces by which the plant gradually transforms one and the same organ” But with Goethe such statements never direct themselves against the possibility, in principle, of knowing the being of things; he is only cautious enough about the physical-mechanical conditions underlying the organism not to draw any conclusions too quickly, since he knew very well that such questions can only be resolved in the course of time. From the beginning, this is the goal of all his striving with respect to the organic natural sciences; in his pursuit of this goal, those particular discoveries arose for him as though of themselves. He had to find them if he did not want to be hindered in his further striving. Natural science before him — which, did not know the essential being of life phenomena, and which simply investigated organisms as compositions of parts, according to outer characteristics, just as one does with inorganic things — often had, along its way, to give these particulars an incorrect interpretation, to present them in a false light. One cannot of course see any such error in the particulars themselves. But we will recognize this only after we have first understood the organism, since the particulars in themselves, considered separately, do not bear within themselves the principle that explains them. They can be explained only by the nature of the whole, because it is the whole that gives them being and significance. Only after Goethe had discovered precisely this nature of the whole did these erroneous interpretations become evident to him; they could not be reconciled with his theory of living beings; they contradicted it. If he wanted to go further on his way, he would have to clear away such preconceptions. This was the case with the intermaxillary bone. Certain facts that are of value and interest only if one possesses just such a theory as that of the vertebral nature of the skull bone were unknown to that older natural science. All these hindrances had to be cleared away by means of individual discoveries. These, therefore, never appear in Goethe's case as ends in themselves; they must always be made in order to confirm a great thought, to confirm that central discovery . The fact cannot be denied that Goethe's contemporaries came to the same observations sooner or later, and that all of them would perhaps be known today even without Goethe's efforts; but even less can the fact be denied that no one until now has expressed his great discovery, encompassing all organic nature, independently of him in such an exemplary way 2 We do not mean in any way to say that Goethe has never been understood at all in this regard. On the contrary, we repeatedly take occasion in this very edition to point to a number of men who seem to us to carry on and elaborate Goethean ideas. Belonging among them are such names as: Voigt, Nees von Esenbeck, d'Alton (senior and junior), Schelver, C.G. Carus, and Martius, among others. But these men in fact built up their systems upon the foundation of the views laid down in the writings of Goethe, and, precisely about them, one cannot say that they would have arrived at their concepts even without Goethe , whereas to be sure, contemporaries of Goethe — Josephi in Göttingen, for example — did come independently upon the intermaxillary bone, and Oken upon the vertebral theory. — in fact, we still lack an even partially satisfactory appreciation of his discovery. Basically it does not matter whether Goethe was the first to discover a certain fact or only rediscovered it; the fact first gains its true significance through the way he fits it into his view of nature. This is what has been overlooked until now. The particular facts have been overly emphasized and this has led to polemics. One has indeed often pointed to Goethe's conviction about the consistency of nature, but one did not recognize that the main thing, in organic science for example, is to show what the nature is of that which maintains this consistency. If one calls it the typus , then one must say in what the being of the typus consists in Goethe's sense of the word. The significance of Goethe's view about plant metamorphosis does not lie, for example, in the discovery of the individual fact that leaf, calyx, corolla, etc., are identical organs, but rather in the magnificent building up in thought of a living whole of mutually interacting formative laws; this building up proceeds from his view of plant metamorphosis, and determines out of itself the individual details and the individual stages of plant development. The greatness of this idea, which Goethe then sought to extend to the animal world also, dawns upon one only when one tries to make it alive in one's spirit, when one undertakes to rethink it. One then becomes aware that this thought is the very nature of the plant itself translated into the idea and living in our spirit just as it lives in the object; one observes also that one makes an organism alive for oneself right into its smallest parts, that one pictures it not as a dead, finished object, but rather as something evolving, becoming, as something never at rest within itself. As we now attempt, in what follows, to present more thoroughly everything we have indicated here, there will become clear to us at the same time the true relationship of the Goethean view of nature to that of our own age, and especially to the theory of evolution in its modern form. Table of Contents Next ˃˃ From the beginning, this is the goal of all his striving with respect to the organic natural sciences; in his pursuit of this goal, those particular discoveries arose for him as though of themselves. He had to find them if he did not want to be hindered in his further striving. Natural science before him — which, did not know the essential being of life phenomena, and which simply investigated organisms as compositions of parts, according to outer characteristics, just as one does with inorganic things — often had, along its way, to give these particulars an incorrect interpretation, to present them in a false light. One cannot of course see any such error in the particulars themselves. But we will recognize this only after we have first understood the organism, since the particulars in themselves, considered separately, do not bear within themselves the principle that explains them. They can be explained only by the nature of the whole, because it is the whole that gives them being and significance. Only after Goethe had discovered precisely this nature of the whole did these erroneous interpretations become evident to him; they could not be reconciled with his theory of living beings; they contradicted it. If he wanted to go further on his way, he would have to clear away such preconceptions. This was the case with the intermaxillary bone. Certain facts that are of value and interest only if one possesses just such a theory as that of the vertebral nature of the skull bone were unknown to that older natural science. All these hindrances had to be cleared away by means of individual discoveries. These, therefore, never appear in Goethe's case as ends in themselves; they must always be made in order to confirm a great thought, to confirm that central discovery . The fact cannot be denied that Goethe's contemporaries came to the same observations sooner or later, and that all of them would perhaps be known today even without Goethe's efforts; but even less can the fact be denied that no one until now has expressed his great discovery, encompassing all organic nature, independently of him in such an exemplary way 2 We do not mean in any way to say that Goethe has never been understood at all in this regard. On the contrary, we repeatedly take occasion in this very edition to point to a number of men who seem to us to carry on and elaborate Goethean ideas. Belonging among them are such names as: Voigt, Nees von Esenbeck, d'Alton (senior and junior), Schelver, C.G. Carus, and Martius, among others. But these men in fact built up their systems upon the foundation of the views laid down in the writings of Goethe, and, precisely about them, one cannot say that they would have arrived at their concepts even without Goethe , whereas to be sure, contemporaries of Goethe — Josephi in Göttingen, for example — did come independently upon the intermaxillary bone, and Oken upon the vertebral theory. — in fact, we still lack an even partially satisfactory appreciation of his discovery. Basically it does not matter whether Goethe was the first to discover a certain fact or only rediscovered it; the fact first gains its true significance through the way he fits it into his view of nature. This is what has been overlooked until now. The particular facts have been overly emphasized and this has led to polemics. One has indeed often pointed to Goethe's conviction about the consistency of nature, but one did not recognize that the main thing, in organic science for example, is to show what the nature is of that which maintains this consistency. If one calls it the typus , then one must say in what the being of the typus consists in Goethe's sense of the word. The significance of Goethe's view about plant metamorphosis does not lie, for example, in the discovery of the individual fact that leaf, calyx, corolla, etc., are identical organs, but rather in the magnificent building up in thought of a living whole of mutually interacting formative laws; this building up proceeds from his view of plant metamorphosis, and determines out of itself the individual details and the individual stages of plant development. The greatness of this idea, which Goethe then sought to extend to the animal world also, dawns upon one only when one tries to make it alive in one's spirit, when one undertakes to rethink it. One then becomes aware that this thought is the very nature of the plant itself translated into the idea and living in our spirit just as it lives in the object; one observes also that one makes an organism alive for oneself right into its smallest parts, that one pictures it not as a dead, finished object, but rather as something evolving, becoming, as something never at rest within itself. As we now attempt, in what follows, to present more thoroughly everything we have indicated here, there will become clear to us at the same time the true relationship of the Goethean view of nature to that of our own age, and especially to the theory of evolution in its modern form.

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA001/English/MP1988/GA001_c01.html

Introduction

GA001_c02

September 1925

Goethean Science

Dornach

If one traces the history of how Goethe's thoughts about the development of organisms arose, one can all too easily be come doubtful about the part one must ascribe to the early years of the poet, i.e., to the time before he went to Weimar. Goethe himself attached very little value to the natural-scientific knowledge he had in that period: “I had no idea what external nature actually means and not the slightest knowledge about its so-called three kingdoms.” On the basis of this statement, one usually thinks that his natural-scientific reflections began only after his arrival in Weimar. Nevertheless, it seems advisable to go back still further if one does not want to leave the whole spirit of his views unexplained. The enlivening power that guided his studies in the direction we want to describe later already manifests itself in earliest youth. When Goethe entered the University of Leipzig, that spirit was still entirely dominant in natural-scientific endeavors which is characteristic of a great part of the eighteenth century, and which sundered the whole of science into two extremes that one felt no need to unite. At one extreme there stood the philosophy of Christian Wolff (1679–1754), which moved entirely within an abstract element; at the other stood the individual branches of science that lost themselves in the outer description of endless details, and that lacked any effort to seek out a higher principle within the world of their particular objects of study. Wolff's kind of philosophy could not find its way out of the sphere of his general concepts into the realm of immediate reality, of individual existence. There the most obvious things were treated with all possible thoroughness. One discovered that a thing is a something that has no contradiction in itself, that there are finite and infinite substances, etc. But if one approached the things themselves with these generalities, in order to understand their life and working, one stood there completely at a loss; one could find no application of those concepts to the world in which we live and which we want to understand. The things themselves, however, that surround us were described in rather non-principle terms, purely according to their looks, according to their outer features. On the one hand, there was a science of principles that lacked living content, that did not delve lovingly into immediate reality; on the other hand, a science without principles, lacking all ideal content; each confronted the other without mediation; each was unfruitful for the other. Goethe's healthy nature found itself repelled in the same way by both kinds of one-sidedness 3 See Poetry and Truth , part 2, book 6 in his opposition to them, there developed within him the mental pictures that later led him to that fruitful grasp of nature in which idea and experience comprehensively interpenetrate each other, mutually enliven one another, and become one whole. The concept, therefore, that those two extremes could grasp the least emerged for Goethe as the very first: the concept of life . When we look at a living being according to its outer manifestation, it presents itself to us as a number of particulars manifesting as its members or organs. The description of these members, according to form, relative position, size, etc., can be the subject of the kind of extensive exposition to which the second of the two sciences we named devoted itself. But one can also describe in this same way any mechanical construction out of inorganic parts. One forgot completely that the main thing to keep in mind about the organism is the fact that here the outer manifestation is governed by an inner principle, that the whole works in every organ. That outer manifestation, the spatial juxtaposition of its parts, can also be observed after its life is destroyed, because it does still remain for a time. But what we have before us as a dead organism is in reality no longer an organism. That principle has disappeared which permeated all the particulars. In opposition to that way of looking at things which destroys life in order to know life Goethe early on established the possibility and need of a higher way . We see this already in a letter of July 14, 1770 from his Strassburg period, in which he speaks of a butterfly: “The poor creature trembles in the net, rubs off its most beautiful colours; and even if one captures it unharmed, it still lies there finally stiff and lifeless; the corpse is not the whole creature; something else belongs to it, a main part, and in this case as in every other, a most major main part: its life ...” The words in Faust [Part I, Study] also have their origin, in fact, from this same view: Who'll know aught living and describe it well, 4 All quotations from Faust are from George Madison Priest's translation. Seeks first the spirit to expel. He then has the component parts in hand But lacks, alas! the spirit's bond. As one would fully expect from a nature like Goethe's, however, he did not stop with the negation of a view, but rather sought to develop his own view more and more; and we can very often find already in the indications we have about his thinking from 1769–1775 the germs of his later works. He was developing for himself the idea of a being in which each part enlivens the other, in which one principle imbues all the particulars. We read in Faust [Part I, Night]: Into the whole how all things blend, Each in the other working, living! And in Satyros [Act 4]: How from no-thing the primal thing arose, How power of light through the night did ring, Imbuing the depths of the beings all; Thus welled up desiring's surge. And the elements disclosed themselves, With hunger into one another poured, All-imbuing, all-imbued . This being is conceived of as subject to continuous changes in time, but in all the stages of these changes only one being is always manifesting itself, a being that asserts itself as what endures, as what is constant within the change. About this primal thing ( Urding ), it is further stated in Satyros : And rolling up and down did go The all and one eternal thing, Ever changing, ever constant ! Compare with this what Goethe wrote in 1807 as an introduction to his theory of metamorphosis: “But if we look at all forms, especially the organic ones, we find that nowhere is there anything enduring, anything at rest, anything complete, but rather it is far more the case that everything is in continuous motion and flux.” Over against this flux, Goethe there sets up the idea — or “a something held fast in the world of experience only for the moment” — as that which is constant . From the above passage from Satyros , one can see clearly enough that the foundation for Goethe's morphological ideas had already been laid before he came to Weimar. But we must firmly bear in mind that this idea of a living being is not applied right away to any single organism, but rather the entire universe is pictured as such a living being. What moves Goethe to this view, of course, is to be sought in his alchemistic studies with Fräulein von Klettenberg and in his reading of Theophrastus Paracelsus after his return from Leipzig (1768–69). Through one experiment or another, one sought to hold fast that principle which permeates the entire universe, to make it manifest within a substance. 5 Poetry and Truth , Part 2, Book 8. Nevertheless, this way of looking at the world, which borders on the mystical , represents only a passing episode in Goethe's development, and so on gives way to a healthier and more objective way of picturing things. But his view of the entire world as one great organism, as we find this indicated in the passages from Faust and from Satyros cited above, still stands until about 1780, as we shall see later from his essay on Nature . This view confronts us once more in Faust, at that place where the earth spirit is represented as that life principle which permeates the universal organism [Part I, Night]: In the tides of life, in actions' storm, Up and down I wave, To and fro weave free, Birth and the grave, An infinite sea, A varied weaving, A radiant living. As definite views were thus developing in Goethe's mind, there came into his hand in Strassburg a book that sought to propound a world view that was the exact antithesis of his own. It was Holbach's Système de la Nature . 6 Poetry and Truth , Part 3, book 11 Whereas until then he had only had to censure the fact that one described what is alive as though it were a mechanical accumulation of individual things, now he could get to know, in Holbach, a philosopher who really regarded what is alive as a mechanism. What, in the former case, sprang merely from an inability to know life down into its roots here leads to a dogma pernicious to life. In Poetry and Truth , Goethe says about this: “One matter supposedly exists from all eternity, and has moved for all eternity, and now with this motion supposedly brings forth right and left and on all sides, without more ado, the infinite phenomena of existence. We would indeed have been satisfied with this, if the author had really built up the world before our eyes out of his moving matter. But he might know as little about nature as we do, for as soon as he has staked up a few general concepts, he leaves nature at once, in order to transform what appears as something higher than nature, or as a higher nature in nature, into a nature that is material, heavy, moving, to be sure, but still without direction or shape, and he believes that he has gained a great deal by this.” Goethe could find nothing in this except “moving matter,” and in opposition to this, his concepts about nature took ever clearer form. We find these brought together and presented in his essay Nature , written about 1780. Since, in this essay, all Goethe's thoughts about nature — which until then we only find in scattered indications — are gathered together, it takes on special significance. The idea here confronts us of a being that is caught up in constant change and yet remains thereby ever the same: “All is new and ever the old.” “She (nature) transforms herself eternally, and there is within her no moment of standing still,” but “her laws are immutable.” We will see later that Goethe seeks the one archetypal plant within the endless multitude of plant forms. We also find this thought indicated here already: “Each of her (nature's) works has its own being, each of her manifestations has the most isolated concept, and yet all constitute one .” Yes, even the position he took later with respect to exceptional cases — namely, not to regard them simply as mistakes in development, but rather to explain them out of natural laws — is already very clearly expressed here: “Even the most unnatural is nature,” and “her exceptions are rare.” We have seen that Goethe had already developed for himself a definite concept of an organism before he came to Weimar. For, even though the above-mentioned essay Nature was written only long after his arrival there, it still contains for the most part earlier views of Goethe. He had not yet applied this concept to any particular genus of natural objects, to any individual beings. In order to do this he needed the concrete world of living beings within immediate reality. A reflection of nature, passed through the human mind, was absolutely not the element that could stimulate Goethe. His botanical conversations with Hofrat Ludwig in Leipzig remained just as much without any deeper effect as the dinner conversations with medical friends in Strassburg. With respect to scientific study, the young Goethe seems altogether to be like Faust, deprived of the freshness of firsthand beholding of nature, who expresses his longing for this in the words [Part I, Night ]: Ah! Could I but on mountain height Go onward in thy [the moon's] lovely light, With spirits hover round mountain caves, Weave over meadows thy twilight laves ... It seems a fulfillment of this longing when, with his arrival in Weimar, he is permitted “to exchange chamber and city air for the atmosphere of country, forest, and garden.” We have to regard as the immediate stimulus to his study of plants the poet's occupation of planting the garden given him by Duke Karl August. The acceptance of the garden by Goethe took place on April 21, 1776, and his diary, edited by R. Keil, informs us often from then on about Goethe's work in this garden, which becomes one of his favorite occupations. An added field for endeavors in this direction was afforded him by the forest of Thüringen, where he had the opportunity of acquainting himself also with the lower organisms in their manifestations of life. The mosses and lichens interest him especially. On October 31, 1777, he requests of Frau von Stein mosses of all sorts, with roots and damp, if possible, so that they can propagate themselves. We must consider it as highly significant that Goethe was already then occupying himself with this world of lower organisms and yet later derived the laws of plant organization from the higher plants. As we consider this fact, we should not attribute it, as many do, to Goethe's underestimation of the significance of less. From then on Goethe never leaves the plant realm. It is very possible that he took up Linnaeus' writings already quite early. We first hear of his acquaintance with them in letters to Frau von Stein in 1782. Linnaeus' endeavour was to bring a systematic overview into knowledge of the plants. A certain sequence was to be discovered, in which every organism has a definite place, so that one could easily find it at any time, so that one would have altogether, in fact, a means of orientation within the unlimited number of particulars. To this end the living beings had to be examined with respect to their degree of relatedness to each other and accordingly be arranged together in groups. Since the main point to all this was to know every plant and easily to find its place within the system, one had to be particularly attentive to those characteristics which distinguish one plant from another. In order to make it impossible to confuse one plant with another, one sought out primarily those distinguishing traits. In doing so, Linnaeus and his students regarded external traits — size, number, and location of individual organs — as characteristic. In this way the plants were indeed ordered sequentially, but just as one could also have ordered a number of inorganic bodies: according to characteristics taken, not from the inner nature of the plant, but from visual aspects. The plants appear in an external juxtaposition, without any inner necessary connection. Because of the significant concept he had of the nature of a living being, Goethe could not be satisfied by this way of looking at things. No effort was made there to seek out the essential being of the plant. Goethe had to ask himself the question: In what does that “something” consist which makes a particular being of nature into a plant? He had to recognize further that this something occurs in all plants in the same way. And yet the endless differentiation of the individual beings was there, needing to be explained. How does it come about that that oneness manifests itself in such manifold forms? These must have been the questions that Goethe raised in reading Linnaeus' writings, for he says of himself after all: “What he — Linnaeus — sought forcibly to keep apart had to strive for unity in accordance with the innermost need of my being.” Goethe's first acquaintance with Rousseau's botanical endeavors falls into about the same period as that with Linnaeus. On June 16, 1782, Goethe writes to Duke Karl August: “Among Rousseau's works there are some most delightful letters about botany, in which he presents this science to a lady in a most comprehensible and elegant way. It is a real model of how one should teach and it supplements Émile . I use it therefore as an excuse to recommend anew the beautiful realm of the flowers to my beautiful lady friends.” Rousseau's botanical endeavors must have made a deep impression on Goethe. The emphasis we find in Rousseau's work upon a nomenclature arising from the nature of the plants and corresponding to it, the freshness of his observations, his contemplation of the plants for their own sake, apart from any utilitarian considerations — all this was entirely in keeping with Goethe's way. And something else the two had in common was the fact that they had come to study the plant, not for any specific scientific purposes, but rather out of general human motives. The same interest drew them to the same thing. Goethe's next intensive observations in the plant world occur in the year 1784. Wilhelm Freiherr von Gleichen, called Russwurm, had published back then two works dealing with research of lively interest to Goethe: The Latest News from the Plant Realm 7 Das Neueste aus dem Reiche der Pflanzen , (Nürnberg 1764) and Special Microscopic Discoveries about Plants, Flowers and Blossoms, Insects, and other Noteworthy Things . 8 Auserlesene mikroskopische Entdeckungen bei Pflanzen, Blumen und Blüten, Insekten und anderen Merkwürdigkeiten , (Nürnberg 1777-81) Both works dealt with the processes of plant fertilization. Pollen, stamens, and pistil were carefully examined and the processes occurring there were portrayed in beautifully executed illustrations. Goethe now repeated these investigations. On January 12, 1785, he writes to Frau von Stein: “A microscope is set up in order, when spring arrives, to re-observe and verify the experiments of von Gleichen, called Russwurm.” During the same spring he also studies the nature of the seed, as a letter to Knebel on April 2, 1785 shows: “I have thought through the substance of the seed as far as my experiences reach.” For Goethe, the main thing in all these investigations is not the individual details; the goal of his efforts is to explore the essential being of the plant. On April 8, 1785, he reports to Merck that he “had made nice discoveries and combinations ” in botany. The term “combinations” also shows us here that his intention is to construct for himself, through thinking, a picture of the processes in the plant world. His botanical studies now drew quickly near to a particular goal. To be sure, we must also now bear in mind that Goethe, in 1784, had already discovered the intermaxillary bone, which we will later discuss in detail, and that this discovery had brought him a significant step closer to the secret of how nature goes about its forming of organic beings. We must, moreover, bear in mind that the first part of Herder's Ideas on the Philosophy of History 9 Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte was completed in 1784 and that conversations between Goethe and Herder on things of nature were very frequent at that time. Thus, Frau von Stein reports to Knebel on May 1, 1784: “Herder's new book makes it likely that we were first plants and animals ... Goethe is now delving very thoughtfully into these things, and everything that has once passed through his mind becomes extremely interesting.” We see from this the nature of Goethe's interest at that time in the greatest questions of science. Therefore his reflections upon the nature of the plant and the combinations he made about it during the spring of 1785 seem quite comprehensible. In the middle of April of this year he goes to Belvedere expressly for the purpose of finding a solution to his doubts and questions, and on June 15, he communicates to Frau von Stein: “I cannot express to you how legible the book of nature is becoming for me; my long efforts at spelling have helped me; now suddenly it is working, and my quiet joy is inexpressible.” Shortly before this, in fact, he wants to write a short botanical treatise for Knebel in order to win him over to this science. 10 “I would gladly send you a little botanical essay, if only it were already written.” (Letter to Knebel, April 2, 1785) Botany draws him so strongly that his trip to Karlsbad, which he begins on June 20, 1785 in order to spend the summer there, turns into a journey of botanical study. Knebel accompanied him. Near Jena, they meet a seventeen-year-old youth, Friedrich Gottlieb Dietrich, whose specimen box showed that he was just returning from a botanical excursion. We hear more in detail about this interesting trip from Goethe's History of my Botanical Studies 11 Geschichte meines botanischen Studiums and from some reports of Ferdinand Cohn in Breslau, who was able to borrow them from one of Dietrich's manuscripts. In Karlsbad then, botanical conversations quite often afford pleasant entertainment. Back home again, Goethe devotes himself with great energy to the study of botany; in connection with Linnaeus' Philosophia Botanica , he makes certain observations about mushrooms, mosses, lichens, and algae, as we see from his letters to Frau von Stein. Only now, after he himself has already thought and observed a great deal, does Linnaeus become more useful to him; in Linnaeus he finds enlightenment about many details that help him forward in his combinations. On November 9, 1785, he reports to Frau von Stein: “I continue to read Linnaeus; I have to; I have no other book. It is the best way to read a book thoroughly, a way I must often practice, especially since I do not easily read a book to the end. This one, however, is not principally made for reading, but rather for review, and it serves me now excellently, since I have thought over most of its points myself.” During these studies it becomes ever clearer to him, that it is after all only one basic form that manifests in the endless multitude of single plant individuals; this basic form itself was also becoming ever more perceptible to him; he recognized further, that within this basic form, there lies the potential for endless transformation, by which manifoldness is created out of oneness . On July 9, 1786, he writes to Frau von Stein: “ It is a becoming aware the ... form with which nature is always only playing, as it were, and in playing brings forth its manifold life .” Now the most important thing of all was to develop this lasting, this constant element this archetypal form with which nature, as it were, plays — to develop it in detail into a plastic configuration. In order to do this, one needed an opportunity to separate what is truly constant and enduring in the form of plants from what is changing and inconstant. For observations of this kind, Goethe had as yet explored too small an area. He had to observe one and the same plant under different conditions and influences; for only through this does the changeable element really become visible. In plants of different kinds this changeable element is less obvious. The journey to Italy that Goethe had undertaken from Karlsbad on September 3 and that gave him such happiness brought him all this. He made many observations already with respect to the flora of the Alps. He found here not merely new plants that he had never seen before, but also plants he knew already, but changed . “Whereas in lower-lying regions, branches and stems were stronger and thicker, the buds closer to each other, and the leaves broad, highest in the mountains, branches and stems became more delicate, the buds moved farther apart so that there was more space between nodes, and the leaves were more lance-shaped. I noticed this in a willow and in a gentian, and convinced myself that it was not because of different species, for example. Also, near the Walchensee I noticed longer and more slender rushes than in the lowlands.” 12 Italian Journey , October 8, 1786 Similar observations occurred repeatedly. By the sea near Venice, he discovers different plants that reveal characteristics that only the old salt of the sandy ground, but even more the salty air, could have given them. He found a plant there that looked to him like “our innocent coltsfoot, but here it was armed with sharp weapons, and the leaf was like leather, as were the seedpods and the stems also; everything was thick and fat.” 13 Italian Journey , September 8, 1786 Goethe there regarded all the outer characteristics of the plant, everything belonging to the visible aspect of the plant, as inconstant, as changing. From this he drew the conclusion that the essential being of the plant, therefore, does not lie in these characteristics, but rather must be sought at deeper levels. It was from observations similar to these of Goethe that Darwin also proceeded when he asserted his doubts about the constancy of the outer forms of genera and species. But the conclusions drawn by the two men are utterly different. Whereas Darwin believes the essential being of the organism to consist in fact only of these outer characteristics, and, from their changeability draws the conclusion that there is therefore nothing constant in the life of the plants, Goethe goes deeper and draws the conclusion that if those outer characteristics are not constant, then the constant element must be sought in something else that underlies those changeable outer aspects. It becomes Goethe's goal to develop this something else, whereas Darwin's efforts go in the direction of exploring and presenting the specific causes of that changeability. Both ways of looking at things are necessary and complement one another. It is completely erroneous to believe that Goethe's greatness in organic science is to be found in the view that he was a mere forerunner of Darwin. Goethe's way of looking at things is far broader; it comprises two aspects: 1. the typus , i.e., the lawfulness manifesting in the organism, the animalness of the animal, the life that gives form to itself out of itself, that has the power and ability — through the possibilities lying within it — to develop itself in manifold outer shapes (species, genera); 2. the interaction of the organism with inorganic nature and of the organisms with each other (adaptation and the struggle for existence). Darwin developed only the latter aspect of organic science. One cannot therefore say that Darwin's theory is the elaboration of Goethe's basic ideas, but rather that it is merely the elaboration of one aspect of his ideas. Darwin's theory looks only at those facts that cause the world of living beings to evolve in a certain way, but does not look at that “something” upon which those facts act determinatively. If only the one aspect is pursued, then it can also not lead to any complete theory of organisms; essentially, this must be pursued in the spirit of Goethe; the one aspect must be complemented and deepened by the other aspect of his theory. A simple comparison will make the matter clearer. Take a piece of lead; heat it into liquid form; and then pour it into cold water. The lead has gone through two states, two stages, one after the other; the first was brought about by the higher temperature, the second by the lower. Now the form that each stage takes does not depend only on the nature of warmth, but also depends quite essentially on the nature of the lead. A different body, if subjected to the same media, would manifest quite different states. Organisms also allow themselves to be influenced by the media surrounding them; they also, affected by these media, assume different states and do so, in fact, totally in accordance with their own nature, in accordance with that being which makes them organisms. And one does find this being in Goethe's ideas. Only someone who is equipped with an understanding for this being will be capable of grasping why organisms respond (react) to particular causes in precisely one way and in no other. Only such a person will be capable of correctly picturing to himself the changeability in the manifest forms of organisms and the related laws of adaptation and of the struggle for existence. 14 It is certainly unnecessary to state that the modern theory of evolution should not at all be placed in doubt by this, or that its assertions should be curtailed by it; on the contrary, only it provides a secure foundation for them. Goethe's thought about the archetypal plant ( Urpflanze ) takes on ever clearer and more definite shape in his mind. In the botanical garden in Padua ( Italian Journey , September 27, 1786), where he goes about in a vegetation strange to him, “The thought becomes ever more alive to him that one could perhaps develop for oneself all the plant shapes out of one shape.” On November 17, 1786, he writes to Knebel: “My little bit of botany is for the first time a real pleasure to have, in these lands where a happier, less intermittent vegetation is at home. I have already made some really nice general observations whose consequences will also please you.” On February 19, 1787 ( see Italian Journey ), he writes in Rome that he is on his way “to discovering beautiful new relationships showing how nature achieves something tremendous that looks like nothing: out of the simple to evolve the most manifold.” On March 25, he asks that Herder be told that he will soon be ready with his archetypal plant. On April 17 (see Italian Journey ) in Palermo? he writes down the following words about the archetypal plant: “There must after all be such a one! How would I otherwise know that this or that formation is a plant, if they were not all formed according to the same model.” He had in mind the complex of developmental laws that organizes the plant, that makes it into what it is, and through which, with respect to a particular object of nature, we arrive at the thought, “This is a plant”: all that is the archetypal plant. As such, the archetypal plant is something ideal something that can only be held in thought; but it takes on shape, it takes on a certain form, size, colour, number of organs, etc. This outer shape is nothing fixed, but rather can suffer endless transformations, which are all in accordance with that complex of developmental laws and follow necessarily from it. If one has grasped these developmental laws, this archetypal picture of the plant, then one is holding, in the form of an idea, that upon which nature as it were founds every single plant individual, and from which nature consequentially derives each plant and allows it to come into being. Yes, one can even invent plant shapes, in accordance with this law, which could emerge by necessity from the being of the plant and which could exist if the necessary conditions arose for this. Thus Goethe seeks, as it were, to copy in spirit what nature accomplishes in the forming of its beings. On May 17, 1787, he writes to Herder: “Furthermore, I must confide to you that I am very close to discovering the secret of plant generation and organization, and that it is the simplest thing one could imagine ... The archetypal plant will be the most magnificent creation in the world, for which nature itself will envy me. With this model and the key to it, one can then go on inventing plants forever that must follow lawfully; that means: which, even if they don't exist, still could exist, and are not, for example? the shadows and illusions of painters or poets but rather have an inner truth and necessity. The same law can be applied to all other living things.” A further difference between Goethe's view and that of Darwin emerges here, especially if one considers how Darwin's view is usually propounded. 15 What we have here is not so much the theory of evolution of those natural scientists who base themselves on sense-perceptible empiricism, but far more the theoretical foundations, the principles, that are laid into the foundations of Darwinism; especially by the Jena school, of course, with Haeckel in the vanguard; in this first-class mind, Darwin's teachings, in all their one-sidedness, have certainly found their consequential development. It assumes that outer influences work upon the nature of an organism like mechanical causes and change it accordingly. For Goethe, the individual changes are the various expressions of the archetypal organism that has within itself the ability to take on manifold shapes and that, in any given case, takes on the shape most suited to the surrounding conditions in the outer world. These outer conditions merely bring it about that the inner formative forces come to manifestation in a particular way. These forces alone are the constitutive principle, the creative element in the plant. Therefore, on September 6, 1787 (Italian Journey) , Goethe also calls it a hen kai pan (a one and all) of the plant world. If we now enter in detail into this archetypal plant itself, the following can be said about it. The living entity is a self contained whole, which brings forth its states of being from out of itself. Both in the juxtaposition of its members and in the temporal sequence of its states of being, there is a reciprocal relationship present, which does not appear to be determined by the sense-perceptible characteristics of its members, nor by any mechanical-causal determining of the later by the earlier, but which is governed by a higher principle standing over the members and the states of being. The fact that one particular state is brought forth first and another one last is determined in the nature of the whole; and the sequence of the intermediary states is also determined by the idea of the whole; what comes before is dependent upon what comes after, and vice versa; in short, within the living organism, there is development of one thing out of the other, a transition of states of being into one another; no finished, closed-off existence of the single thing, but rather continuous becoming. In the plant, this determination of each individual member by the whole arises insofar as every organ is built according to the same basic form. On May 17, 1787 (Italian Journey) ), Goethe communicates these thoughts to Herder in the following words: “It became clear to me, namely, that within that organ (of the plant) that we usually address as leaf, there lies hidden the true Proteus that can conceal and manifest itself in every shape. Any way you look at it, the plant is always only leaf, so inseparably joined with the future germ that one cannot think the one without the other.” Whereas in the animal that higher principle that governs every detail appears concretely before us as that which moves the organs and uses them in accordance with its needs, etc., the plant is still lacking any such real life principle; in the plant, this life principle still manifests itself only in the more indistinct way that all its organs are built according to the same formative type — in fact, that the whole plant is contained as possibility in every part and, under favorable conditions, can also be brought forth from any part. This became especially clear to Goethe in Rome when Councilor Reiffenstein, during a walk with him, broke off a branch here and there and asserted that if it were stuck in the ground it would have to grow and develop into a whole plant. The plant is therefore a being that successively develops certain organs that are all — both in their interrelationships and in the relationship of each to the whole — built according to one and the same idea. Every plant is a harmonious whole composed of plants. 16 We will have occasion at various places to demonstrate in what sense these individual parts relate to the whole. If we wanted to borrow a concept of modern science for such working together of living partial entities into one whole, we might take for example that of a “stock” in zoology. This is a kind of statehood of living entities, an individual that itself further consists of independent individuals, an individual of a higher sort. When Goethe saw this clearly, his only remaining concern was with the individual observations that would make it possible to set forth in detail the various stages of development that the plant brings forth from itself. For this also, what was needed had already occurred. We have seen that in the spring of 1785 Goethe had already made a study of seeds; on May 17, 1787, from Italy, he announces to Herder that he has quite clearly and without any doubt found the point where the germ (Keim) lies. That took care of the first stage of plant life. But the unity of structure in all leaves also soon revealed itself visibly enough. Along with numerous other examples showing this, Goethe found above all in fresh fennel a difference between the lower and upper leaves, which nevertheless are always the same organ. On March 25 (Italian Journey) , he asks Herder to be informed that his theory about the cotyledons was already so refined that one could scarcely go further with it. Only one small step remained to be taken in order also to regard the petals, the stamens, and the pistil as metamorphosed leaves. The research of the English botanist Hill could lead to this; his research was becoming more generally known at that time, and dealt with the transformation of individual flower organs into other ones. As the forces that organize the being of the plant come into actual existence, they take on a series of structural forms in space. Then it is a question of the big concept that connects these forms backwards and forwards. When we look at Goethe's theory of metamorphosis, as it appears to us in the year 1790, we find that for Goethe this concept is one of calculating expansion and contraction. In the seed, the plant formation is most strongly contracted (concentrated). With the leaves there follows the first unfolding, the first expansion of the formative forces. That which, in the seed, is compressed into a plant now spreads out spatially in the leaves. In the calyx the forces again draw together around an axial point; the corolla is produced by the next expansion; stamens and pistil come about through the next contraction; the fruit arises through the last (third) expansion, whereupon the whole force of plant life (its entelechical principle) conceals itself again, in its most highly concentrated state, in the seed. Although we now can follow nearly all the details of Goethe's thoughts on metamorphosis up to their final realization in the essay that appeared in 1790, it is not so easy to do the same thing with the concept of expansion and contraction. Still one will not go wrong in assuming that this thought, which anyway is deeply rooted in Goethe's spirit, was also woven by him already in Italy into his concept of plant formation. Since a greater or lesser spatial development, which is determined by the formative forces, is the content of this thought, and since this content therefore consists in what the plant presents directly to the eye, this content will certainly arise most easily when one undertakes to draw the plant in accordance with the laws of natural formation . Goethe found now a bush-like carnation plant in Rome that showed him metamorphosis with particular clarity. He writes about this: “Seeing no way to preserve this marvelous shape, I undertook to draw it exactly, and in doing so attained ever more insight into the basic concept of metamorphosis.” Perhaps such drawings were often made and this could then have led to the concept we are considering. In September 1787, during his second stay in Rome, Goethe expounds the matter to his friend Moritz; in doing so he discovers how alive and perceptible the matter becomes through such a presentation. He always writes down how far they have gotten. To judge by this passage and by a few other statements of Goethe's, it seems likely that the writing down of his theory of metamorphosis — at least aphoristically occurred already in Italy. He states further: “Only in this way — through presenting it to Moritz — could I get something of my thoughts down on paper.” There is now no doubt about the fact that this work, in the form in which we now have it, was written down at the end of 1789 and the beginning of 1790; but it would be difficult to say how much of this latter manuscript was a mere editing and how much was added then. A book announced for the next Easter season, which could have contained something of the same thoughts, induced him in the autumn of 1789 to take his thoughts in hand and to arrange lot their publication. On November 20, he writes to the Duke that he is spurred on to write down his botanical ideas. On December 18, he sends the manuscript already to the botanist Batsch in Jena for him to look over; on the 20th, he goes there himself in order to discuss it with Batsch; on the 22nd, he informs Knebel that Batsch has given the matter a favorable reception. He returns home, works the manuscript through once more, and then sends it to Batsch again, who returns it to him on January 19, 1790. Goethe himself has recounted in detail the experiences undergone by the handwritten manuscript as well as by the printed edition. Later, in the section on “The Nature and Significance of Goethe's Writings on Organic Development,” we will deal with the great significance of Goethe's theory of metamorphosis, as well as with the detailed nature of this theory.

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA001/English/MP1988/GA001_c02.html

How Goethe's Theory of Metamorphosis Arose

GA001_c03

September 1925

Goethean Science

Dornach

Lavater's great work Physiognomical Fragments for Furthering Human Knowledge and Human Love 17 Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntnis und Menschenliebe appeared during the years 1775–1778. Goethe had taken a lively interest in it, not only through the fact that he oversaw its publication, but also by making contributions to it himself. But what is of particular interest now is that, within these contributions, we can already find the germ of his later zoological works. Physiognomy sought, in the outer form of the human being, to know his inner nature, his spirit. One studied the human shape, not for its own sake, but rather as an expression of the soul. Goethe's sculptural spirit, born to know outer relationships, did not stop there. As he was in the middle of those studies that treated outer form only as a means of knowing the inner being, there dawned on him the independent significance of the former, the shape. We see this from his articles on animal skulls written in 1776, that we find inserted into the second section of the second volume of the Physiognomical Fragments . During that year, he is reading Aristotle on physiognomy, finds himself stimulated by it to write the above articles, but at the same time attempts to investigate the difference between the human being and the animals. He finds this difference in the way the whole human structure brings the head into prominence, in the lofty development of the human brain, toward which all the members of the body point, as though to their central place: “How the whole form stands there as supporting column for the dome in which the heavens are to be reflected.” He finds the opposite of this now in animal structure. “The head merely hung upon the spine! The brain, as the end of the spinal cord, has no more scope than is necessary for the functioning of the animal spirits and for directing a creature whose senses are entirely within the present moment.” With these indications, Goethe has raised himself above the consideration of the individual connections between the outer and inner being of man, to the apprehension of a great whole and to a contemplation of the form as such. He arrived at the view that the whole of man's structure forms the basis of his higher life manifestations, that within the particular nature of this whole, there lie the determining factors that place man at the peak of creation. What we must bear in mind above everything else in this is that Goethe seeks the animal form again in the perfected human one; except that, with the former, the organs that serve more the animal functions come to the fore, are, as it were, the point toward which the whole structure tends and which the structure serves, whereas the human structure particularly develops those organs that serve spiritual functions. We find here already: What hovers before Goethe as the animal organism is no longer this or that sense-perceptible real organism, but rather an ideal one, which, with the animals, develops itself more toward the lower side, and with man toward a higher one. Here already is the germ of what Goethe later called the typus , and by which he did not mean “any individual animal,” but rather the “idea” of the animal. And even more: Here already we find the echo of a law that he enunciated later and that is very significant in its implications — to the effect, namely, “that diversity of form springs from the fact that a preponderance is granted to this or that part over the others.” Here already, the contrast between animal and man is sought in the fact that an ideal form develops itself in two different directions, that in each case, one organ system gains a preponderance and the whole creature receives its character from this. In the same year (1776), we also find, however, that Goethe becomes clear about the starting point for someone who wants to study the form of the animal organism. He recognized that the bones are the foundations of its formations, a thought he later upheld by definitely taking the study of bones as his starting point in anatomical work. In this year he writes down a sentence that is important in this respect: “The mobile parts form themselves according to them (the bones) — or better, with them — and come into play only insofar as the solid parts allow.” And a further indication in Lavater's physiognomy (“It may already have been noticed that I consider the bony system to be the basic sketch of the human being , the skull to be the fundamental element of the bony system, and all fleshy parts to be hardly more than the colour on this drawing.”) may very well have been written under the stimulus of Goethe, who often discussed these things with Lavater. These views are in fact identical to indications written down by Goethe. But Goethe now makes a further observation about this, which we must particularly take into consideration: “This statement (that one can see from the bones, and indeed most strongly of all from the skull, how the bones are the foundations of the form) which here (with respect to the animals) is indisputable, will meet with serious contradiction when applied to the dissimilarity of human skulls .” What is Goethe doing here other than seeking the simpler animal again within the complex human being, as he later expressed it (1795)! From this we can gain the conviction that the basic thoughts upon which Goethe's thoughts on the development of animal form were later to be built up had already established themselves in him out of his occupation with Lavater's physiognomy in the year 1776 . In this year, Goethe's study of the particulars of anatomy also begins. On January 22, 1776, he writes to Lavater: “The duke had six skulls sent to me; have noticed some marvelous things which are at your honor's disposal, if you have not found them without me.” His connections with the university in Jena gave him further stimulus to a more thorough study of anatomy. We find the first indications of this in the year 1781. In his diary, published by Keil, under the date October 15, 1781, Goethe notes that he went to Jena with old Einsiedel and studied anatomy there. At Jena there was a scholar who furthered Goethe's studies immensely: Loder. This same man then also introduces him further into anatomy, as Goethe writes to Frau von Stein on October 29, 1781, 18 “A troublesome service of love that I have undertaken is bringing me closer to my passion. Loder is explaining all the bones and muscles to me, and I will grasp a great deal within a few days.” and to Karl August on November 4. 19 “He (Loder) has demonstrated osteology and myology for me during these eight days, which we have used almost entirely for this purpose; as much, in fact, as my attentiveness could stand.” To the latter he now also expressed his intention of “explaining the skeleton,” to the “young people” in the Art Academy, and of “leading them to a knowledge of the human body.” He adds: “I do it both for my sake and for theirs; the methods I have chosen will make them, over this winter, fully familiar with the basic pillars of the body.” The entries in Goethe's diary show that he actually did give these lectures, ending them on January 16. There must have been many discussions with Loder about the structure of the human body during this same period. Under the date of January 6, the diary notes: “Demonstration of the heart by Loder.” Just as we now have seen that in 1776 Goethe was already harboring far-reaching thoughts about the structure of animal organization, so we cannot doubt for a moment that his present thorough study of anatomy raised itself beyond the consideration of the particulars to higher points of view. Thus he writes to Lavater and Merck on November 14, 1781 that he is treating “bones as a text to which everything living and everything human can be appended.” As we consider a text, pictures and ideas take shape in our spirit that seem to be called forth. to be created by the text. Goethe treated the bones as just such a text; i.e., as he contemplates them, thoughts arise in him about everything living and everything human. During these contemplations, therefore. definite ideas about the formation of the organism must have struck him. Now we have an ode by Goethe, from the year 1782, “The Divine,” which lets us know to some extent how he thought at the time about the relationship of the human being to the rest of nature. The first verse reads Noble be man, Helpful and good! For that alone Distinguishes him From all the beings That we know. Having grasped the human being in the first two lines of this verse according to his spiritual characteristics, Goethe states that these alone distinguish him from all the other beings of the world. This “ alone ” shows us quite clearly that Goethe considered man, in his physical constitution, to be absolutely in conformity with the rest of nature. The thought, to which we already drew attention earlier, becomes ever more alive in him, that one basic form governs the shape of the human being as well as of the animals, that the basic form only mounts to such perfection in man's case that it is capable of being the bearer of a free spiritual being. With respect to his sense-perceptible characteristics, the human being must also, as the ode goes on to state: By iron laws Mighty, eternal His existence's Circle complete. But in man these laws develop in a direction that makes it possible for him to do the “impossible”: He distinguishes, Chooses and judges; He can the moment Endow with duration. Now we must also still bear in mind that while these views were developing ever more definitely in Goethe, he stood in lively communication with Herder, who in 1783 began to write his Ideas on a Philosophy of the History of Mankind . This work might also be said to have arisen out of the discussions between these two men, and many an idea must be traced back to Goethe. The thoughts expressed here are often entirely Goethean, although stated in Herder's words, so we can draw from them a trustworthy conclusion about Goethe's thoughts at that time. Now in the first part of his book, Herder holds the following view about the nature of the world. A principle form must be presupposed that runs through all beings and realizes itself in different ways. “From stone to crystal, from crystal to metals, from these to plant creation, from plants to animal, from it to the human being, we saw the form of organization ascend , and saw along with it the forces and drives of the creature diversify and finally all unite themselves in the form of man, insofar as this form could encompass them.” The thought is perfectly clear: An ideal typical form, which as such is not itself sense-perceptibly real, realizes itself in an endless number of spatially separated entities with differing characteristics all the way up to man. At the lower levels of organization, this ideal form always realizes itself in a particular direction; the ideal form develops in a particular way according to this direction. When this typical form ascends as far as man, it brings together all the developmental principles — which it had always developed only in a one-sided way in the lower organisms and had distributed among different entities — in order to form one shape. From this, there also follows the possibility of such high perfection in the human being. In man's case, nature bestowed upon one being what, in the case of the animals, it had dispersed among many classes and orders. This thought worked with unusual fruitfulness upon the German philosophy that followed. To elucidate this thought, let us mention here the description that Oken later gave of the same idea. In his Textbook of Natural Philosophy 20 Lehrbuch der Naturphilosophie , he says. “The animal realm is only one animal; i.e., it is the representation of animalness with all its organs existing each as a whole in itself. An individual animal arises when an individual organ detaches itself from the general animal body and yet carries out the essential animal functions. The animal realm is merely the dismembered highest animal: man. There is only one human kind, only one human race, only one human species, just because man is the whole animal realm.” Thus there are, for example, animals in which the organs of touch are developed, whose whole organization, in fact, tends toward the activity of touch and finds its goal in this activity; and other animals in which the instruments for eating are particularly developed, and so forth; in short, with every species of animal, one organ system comes one-sidedly to the fore; the whole animal merges into it; everything else about the animal recedes into the background. Now in human development, all the organs and organ systems develop in such a way that one allows the other enough space to develop freely, that each one retires within those boundaries that seem necessarily to allow all the others to come into their own in the same way. In this way, there arises a harmonious interworking of the individual organs and systems into a harmony that makes man into the most perfect being, into the being that unites the perfections of all other creatures within itself. These thoughts now also formed the content of the conversations of Goethe with Herder, and Herder gives expression to them in the following way: that “the human race is to be regarded as the great confluence of lower organic forces that, in him, were to arrive at the forming of humanity.” And in another place: “And so we can assume: that man is a central creation among the animals, i.e., that he is the elaborated form in which the traits of all the species gather around him in their finest essence .” In order to indicate the interest Goethe took in Herder's work Ideas on a Philosophy of the History of Mankind , let us cite the following passage from a letter of Goethe to Knebel in December 8, 1783: “Herder is writing a philosophy of history, such as you can imagine, new from the ground up. We read the first chapters together the day before yesterday; they are exquisite ... world and natural history is positively rushing along with us now.” Herder's expositions in Book 3, Chapter VI, and in Book 4, Chapter I, to the effect that the erect posture inherent in the human organization and everything connected with it is the fundamental prerequisite for his activity of reason — all this reminds us directly of what Goethe indicated in 1776 in the second section of the second volume of Lavater's Physiognomical Fragments about the generic difference between man and the animals, which we have already mentioned above. This is only an elaboration of that thought. All this justifies us, however, in assuming that in the main Goethe and Herder were in agreement all that time (1783 ff.) with respect to their views about the place of the human being m nature. But this basic view requires now that every organ, every part of an animal, must also be able to be found again in man, only pushed back within the limits determined by the harmony of the whole. To be sure, a certain bone, for example, must achieve a definite form in a particular species, must become predominant there, but this bone must also at least be indicated in all other species; it must in fact also not be missing in man. If, in a certain species, the bone takes on a form appropriate to it by virtue of its own laws, then, in man the bone must adapt itself to the whole, must accommodate its own laws of development to those of the whole organism. But it must not be lacking, if a split is not to occur in nature by which the consistent development of a type would be interrupted. This is how the matter stood with Goethe, when all at once he became aware of a view that totally contradicted this great thought. The learned men of that time were chiefly occupied with finding traits that would distinguish one species of animal from another. The difference between animals and man was supposed to consist in the fact that the former have a little bone, the intermaxillary bone, between the two symmetrical halves of the upper jaw, which holds the upper incisors and supposedly is lacking in man. In the year 1782, when Merck was beginning to take a lively interest in osteology and was turning for help to some of the best-known scholars of that time, he received from one of them, the distinguished anatomist Sömmerring, on October 8,1782, the following information about the difference between animal and man: “I wish you had consulted Blumenbach on the subject of the intermaxillary bone, which, other things being equal, is the only bone that all the animals have, from the ape on, including even the orangutan, but that is never found in man ; except for this bone, there is nothing keeping you from being able to transfer everything man has onto the animals. I enclose therefore the head of a doe in order to convince you that this os intermaxillare (as Blumenbach calls it) or os incisivum (as Camper calls it) is present even in animals having no incisors in the upper jaw.” Although Blumenbach found in the skulls of unborn or young children a trace quasi rudimentum of the ossis intermaxillaris — indeed, had once found in one such skull two fully separated little kernels of bone as actual intermaxillary bones — still he did not acknowledge the existence of any such bone. He said about this: “There is a world of difference between it and the true osse intermaxillari .” Camper, the most famous anatomist of the time, was of the same view. He referred to the intermaxillary bone, for example, as having “never been found in a human being, not even in the negro.” 21 In: Natural Scientific Discussions on the Orangutan (“Natuurkundige verhandelingen over den orang outang”) Merck held Camper in the deepest admiration and occupied himself with his writings. Not only Merck, but also Blumenbach and Sömmerring were in communication with Goethe. His correspondence with Merck shows us that Goethe took the deepest interest in Merck's study of bones and shared his own thoughts about these things with him. On October 27, 1782, he asked Merck to write him something about Camper's incognitum , 22 An animal, see page 38 — Ed. and to send him Camper's letters. Furthermore, we must note a visit of Blumenbach in Weimar in April, 1783. In September of the same year, Goethe goes to Göttingen in order to visit Blumenbach and all the professors there. On September 28, he writes to Frau von Stein: “I have decided to visit all the professors and you can imagine how much running about it requires to make the rounds in a few days.” He goes up to Kassel where he meets with Forster and Sömmerring. From there he writes to Frau von Stein on October 2: “I am seeing very fine and good things and am being rewarded for my quiet diligence. The happiest news is that I can now say that I am on the right path and from now on nothing is lost.” It is in the course of these activities that Goethe must first have become aware of the prevailing views about the intermaxillary bone. To his way of looking at things, these views must right away have seemed erroneous. The typical basic form, according to which all organisms must be built, would thereby be destroyed. For Goethe, there could be no doubt that this part, which to a more or less developed degree is to be found in all higher animals, must also have its place in the development of the human form, and would only recede in man because the organs of food-intake in general recede before the organs serving mental functions. By virtue of his whole spiritual orientation, Goethe could not think otherwise than that an intermaxillary bone must also be present in man. It was only a matter of proving this empirically, of finding what form this bone takes in man and to what extent it adapts itself to the whole of his organism. He succeeded in finding this proof in the spring of 1784, together with Loder, with whom he compared human and animal skulls in Jena. On March 27, he reported the matter to both Frau von Stein 23 “An exquisite pleasure has been granted me; I have made an anatomical discovery that is important and beautiful.” and to Herder. 24 “I have found — not silver or gold, but something that gives me inexpressible joy — the os intermaxillare in man!” Now this individual discovery, compared to the great thought by which it is sustained should not be overvalued: for Goethe also, its value lay only in the fact that it cleared away a preconception that seemed to hinder his ideas from being consistently pursued right into the farthest details of an organism. Goethe also never regarded it as an individual discovery, but always only in connection with his larger view of nature. This is how we must understand it when, in the above mentioned letter to Herder, he says: “It should heartily please you also, for it is like the keystone to man; it is not lacking; it is there too! And how!” And right away he reminds his friend of the wider perspective: “I thought of it also in connection with your whole picture, how beautiful it will be there.” For Goethe, it could make no sense to assert that the animals have an intermaxillary bone but that man has none. If it lies within the forces that shape an organism to insert an intermediary bone between the two upper jaw bones of animals, then these same forces must also be active in man, at the place where that bone is present in animals, and working in essentially the same way except for differences in outer manifestation. Since Goethe never thought of an organism as a dead, rigid configuration, but rather always as going forth out of its inner forces of development, he had to ask himself: What are these forces doing within the upper jaw of man? It could definitely not be a matter of whether the intermaxillary is present or not, but only of what it is like, of the form it has taken. And this had to be discovered empirically. The thought of writing a more comprehensive work on nature now made itself felt more and more in Goethe. We can conclude this from different things he said. Thus he writes to Knebel in November 1784, when he sends him the treatise on his discovery: “I have refrained from showing yet the result, to which Herder already points in his ideas, which is, namely, that one cannot find the difference between man and animal in the details .” Here the important point is that Goethe says he has refrained from showing the basic thought yet ; he wants to do this therefore later, in a larger context. Furthermore, this passage shows us that the basic thoughts that interest us in Goethe above all — the great ideas about the animal typus — were present long before that discovery. For, Goethe admits here himself that indications of them are already to be found in Herder's ideas; the passages, however, in which they occur were written before the discovery of the intermaxillary bone. The discovery of the intermaxillary bone is therefore only a result of these momentous views . For people who did not have these views, the discovery must have remained incomprehensible. They were deprived of the only natural, historic characteristic by which to differentiate man from the animals. They had little inkling of those thoughts which dominated Goethe and which we earlier indicated: that the elements dispersed among the animals unite themselves in the one human form into a harmony; and thus, in spite of the similarity of the individual parts, they establish a difference in the whole that bestows upon man his high rank in the sequence of beings. They did not look at things ideally, but rather in an externally comparative way; and for this latter approach, to be sure, the intermaxillary bone was not there in man. They had little understanding for what Goethe was asking of them: to see with the eyes of the spirit . That was also the reason for the difference in judgment between them and Goethe. Whereas Blumenbach, who after all also saw the matter quite clearly, came to the conclusion that “there is a world of difference between it and the true ‘ osse intermaxillari ’,” Goethe judged the matter thus: How can an outer diversity, no matter how great, be explained in the face of the necessary inner identity? Apparently Goethe wanted to elaborate this thought now in a consistent manner and he did occupy himself a great deal with this, particularly in the years immediately following. On May 1, 1784, Frau von Stein writes to Knebel: “Herder's new book makes it likely that we were first plants and animals ... Goethe is now delving very thoughtfully into these things, and each thing that has once passed through his mind becomes extremely interesting.” To what extent there lived in Goethe the thought of presenting his views on nature in a larger work becomes particularly clear to us when we see that, with every new discovery he achieves, he cannot keep from expressly raising the possibility to his friends of extending his thoughts out over the whole of nature. In 1786, he writes to Frau von Stein that he wants to extend his ideas — about the way nature brings forth its manifold life by playing, as it were, with one main form — “out over all the realms of nature, out over its whole realm.” And when in Italy the idea of metamorphosis in the plants stands plastically in all its details before his spirit, he writes in Naples on May 17, 1787: “The same law can be applied ... to everything living.” The first essay in Morphological Notebooks (1817) 25 “ Morphologische Hefte ” contains the words: “May that, therefore, which I often dreamed of in my youthful spirit as a book now appear as a sketch, even as a fragmentary collection.” It is a great pity that such a work from Goethe's hand did not come about. To judge by everything we have, it would have been a creation far surpassing everything of this sort that has been done in recent times. It would have become a canon from which every endeavor in the field of natural science would have to take its start and against which one could test the spiritual content of such an endeavor. The deepest philosophical spirit, which only superficiality could deny to Goethe, would have united with a loving immersion of oneself into what is given to sense experience; far from any one-sided desire to found a system purporting to encompass all beings in one general schema, this endeavor would grant every single individual its rightful due. We would have had to do here with the work of a spirit in whom no one individual branch of human endeavor pushes itself forward at the expense of all the others, but rather in whom the totality of human existence always hovers in the background when he is dealing with one particular area. Through this, every single activity receives its rightful place in the interrelationships of the whole. The objective immersing of oneself into the observed objects brings it about that the human spirit fully merges with them, so that Goethe's theories appear to us, not as though a human spirit abstracted them from the objects, but rather as though the objects themselves formed these theories within a human spirit who, in beholding, forgets himself . This strictest objectivity would make Goethe's work the most perfect work of natural science; it would be an ideal for which every natural scientist would have to strive; for the philosopher, it would be an archetypal model of how to find the laws of objective contemplation of the world . One can conclude that the epistemology now arising everywhere as a philosophical basic science will be able to become fruitful only when it takes as its starting point Goethe's way of thinking and of looking at the world. In the Annals of 1790, Goethe himself gives the reason why this work did not come about: “The task was so great that it could not be accomplished in a scattered life.” If one proceeds from this standpoint, the individual fragments we have of Goethe's natural science take on immense significance. We learn to value and understand them rightly, in fact, only when we regard them as going forth from that great whole. In the year 1784, however, merely as a kind of preliminary exercise, the treatise on the intermaxillary bone was to be produced. To begin with, it was not to be published, for Goethe writes of it to Sömmerring on March 6,1785: “Since my little treatise is not entitled at all to come before the public and is to be regarded merely as a rough draft , it would please me very much to hear anything you might want to share with me about this matter.” Nevertheless it was carried out with all possible care and with the help of all the necessary individual studies. At the same time, help was enlisted from young people who, under Goethe's guidance, had to carry out osteological drawings in accordance with Camper's methods. On April 23, 1784, therefore, he asks Merck for information about these methods and has Sömmerring send him Camperian drawings. Merck, Sömmerring, and other acquaintances are asked for skeletons and bones of every kind. On April 23, he writes to Merck that it would please him very much to have the following skeletons: “... a myrmecophaga, bradypus, lion, tiger, or similar skeletons.” On May 14, he asks Sömmerring for the skull of his elephant skeleton and of the hippopotamus, and on September 16, for the skulls of the following animals: “wildcat, lion, young bear, incognitum, anteater, camel, dromedary, sea lion.” Individual items of information are also requested from his friends: thus from Merck the description of the palatal part of his rhinoceros and particularly the explanation as to “how the rhinoceros horn is actually seated upon the nasal bone.” At this time, Goethe is utterly absorbed in his studies. The elephant skull mentioned above was sketched by Waitz from many sides by Camper's methods, and was compared by Goethe with a large skull in his possession and with other animal skulls, since he discovered that in this skull most of the sutures were not yet grown together. In connection with this skull, he makes an important observation. Until then one assumed that in all animals merely the incisors were embedded in the intermaxillary bone, and that the canine teeth belonged to the upper jaw bone; only the elephant was supposed to be an exception. In it, the canine teeth were supposed to be contained in the intermaxillary bone. This skull now shows him also that this is not the case, as he states in a letter to Herder. His osteological studies accompany him on a journey to Eisenach and to Braunschweig that Goethe undertakes during that summer. On the second trip, in Braunschweig, he wants “to look into the mouth of an unborn elephant and to carry on a hearty conversation with Zimmermann.” He writes further about this fetus to Merck: “I wish we had in our cupboard the fetus they have in Braunschweig: it would be quickly dissected, skeletized, and prepared. I don't know what value such a monster in spirits has if it is not dismembered and its inner structure explained.” From these studies, there then emerges that treatise which is reported in Volume I of the natural-scientific writings in Kürschner's National Literature . Loder was very helpful to Goethe in composing this treatise. With his assistance, a Latin terminology comes into being. Moreover, Loder prepares a Latin translation. In November 1784, Goethe sends the treatise to Knebel and already on December 19 to Merck, although only shortly before (on December 2) he believes that not much will come of it before the end of the year. The work was equipped with the necessary drawings. For Camper's sake, the Latin translation just mentioned was included. Merck was supposed to send the work on to Sömmerring. The latter received it in January 1785. From there it went to Camper. When we now take a look at the way Goethe's treatise was received, we are confronted by a quite unpleasant picture. At first no one has the organ to understand him except Loder, with whom he had worked, and Herder. Merck is pleased by the treatise, but is not convinced of the truth of what is asserted there. In the letter in which Sömmerring informs Merck of the arrival of the treatise, we read: “Blumenbach already had the main idea. In the paragraph which begins ‘Thus there can be no doubt,’ he [Goethe] says ‘since the rest of them (the edges) are grown together’; the only trouble is that these edges were never there. I have in front of me now jawbones of embryos, ranging from three months of age to maturity, and no edge was ever to be seen toward the front. And to explain the matter by the pressure of bones against each other? Yes, if nature works like a carpenter with hammer and wedges!” On February 13, 1785, Goethe writes to Merck: “I have received from Sömmerring a very frivolous letter. He actually wants to talk me out of it. Oh my!” — And Sömmerring writes to Merck on May 11, 1785: “Goethe, as I can see from his letter yesterday, still does not want to abandon his idea about the ossis intermaxillaris .” And now Camper . 26 Until now, one has assumed that Camper received the treatise anonymously. It came to him in a roundabout way: Goethe sent it first to Sömmerring, who sent it to Merck, who was supposed to get it to Camper. But among the letters of Merck to Camper (which are not yet published, and whose originals are to be found in the Library of the Netherlands Society for the Progress of Medicine in Amsterdam), there is one letter of January 17, 1785 containing the following passage (I quote it verbatim): “Mr. Goethe, celebrated poet, intimate counselor of the Duke of Weimar, has just sent me an osteological specimen that is supposed to be sent to you after Mr. Sömmerring has seen it ... It is a small treatise on the intermaxillary bone that teaches, us among other things, the truth that the manatee has four incisors and that the camel has two of them.” A letter of March 10, 1785, in which the name Goethe is again expressly present, states that Merck will shortly send the treatise on to Camper: “I will have the honor of sending you the osteological specimen of Mr. von Goethe, my friend ...” On April 28, 1785, Merck expressed the hope that Camper received the thing and again the name “Goethe” is present. Thus there is no doubt that Camper knew who the author was. On September 17, 1785, he communicates to Merck that the accompanying tables were not drawn at all according to his methods. He in fact found them to be quite faulty. The outer aspect of the beautiful manuscript is praised and the Latin translation is criticized — in fact, the advice is even given to the author that he brush up on his Latin. Three days later, he writes that he has made a number of observations about the intermaxillary bone, but that he must continue to maintain that man has no intermaxillary bone. He agrees with all of Goethe's observations except the ones pertaining to man. On March 21, 1786, he writes yet again that, out of a great number of observations, he has come to the conclusion: the intermaxillary bone does not exist in man . Camper's letters show clearly that he could go into the matter with the best possible will, but was not able to understand Goethe at all. Loder at once saw Goethe's discovery in the right light. He gives it a prominent place in his anatomical handbook of 1788 and treats it from now on in all his writings as a fully valid fact of science about which there cannot be the least doubt. Herder writes about this to Knebel: “Goethe has presented me with his treatise on the bone; it is very simple and beautiful; the human being travels the true path of nature and fortune comes to meet him.” Herder was in fact able to look at the matter with the “spiritual eye” with which Goethe saw it. Without this eye, a person could do nothing with this matter. One can see this best from the following. Wilhelm Josephi (instructor at the University of Göttingen) writes in his Anatomy of the Mammals 27 Anatomie der Säugetiere in 1787: “The ossa intermaxillaria is also considered to be one of the main characteristics differentiating the apes from man; yet, according to my observation, the human being also has such as ossa intermaxillaria , at least in the first months of his life, but it has usually grown together very early — already in the mother's womb, in fact — with the true upper jaw bones, especially in its external appearance, so that often no noticeable trace remains of it at all.” Goethe's discovery is, to be sure, also fully stated here, not as one demanded by the consistent realization of the typus , however, but rather as the expression of fact directly visible to the eye. If one relies only upon the latter, then, to be sure, it depends only upon a happy chance whether or not one finds precisely such specimens in which one can see the matter exactly. But if one grasps the matter in Goethe's ideal way, then these particular specimens serve merely as confirmation of the thought, are there merely to demonstrate openly what nature otherwise conceals; but the idea itself can be found in any specimen at all; every specimen reveals a particular case of the idea. In fact, if one possesses the idea, one is able through it to find precisely those cases in which the idea particularly expresses itself. Without the idea, however, one is at the mercy of chance. One sees, in actuality, that after Goethe had given the impetus by his great thought, one then gradually became convinced of the truth of his discovery through observation of numerous cases. Merck, to be sure, continued to vacillate. On February 13, 1785, Goethe sends him a split-open upper jawbone of a human being and one of a manatee, and gives him points of reference for understanding the matter. From Goethe's letter of April 8, it appears that Merck was won over to a certain extent. But he soon changed his mind again, for on November 11, 1786, he writes to Sömmerring: “According to what I hear, Vicq d'Azyr has actually included Goethe's so-called discovery in his book.” Sömmerring gradually abandoned his opposition. In his book On The Structure of the Human Body 28 Vom Baue des menschlichen Körpers he says: “Goethe's ingenious attempt in 1785, out of comparative osteology, to show, with quite correct drawings, that man has the intermaxillary bone of the upper jaw in common with the other animals, deserved to be publicly recognized.” To be sure, it was more difficult to win over Blumenbach. In his Handbook of Comparative Anatomy 29 Handbuch der vergleichenden Anatomie in 1805, he still stated the opinion that man has no intermaxillary bone. In his essay Principles of Zoological Philosophy , written in 1830 – 32, however, Goethe can already speak of Blumenbach's conversion. After personal communication, he came over to Goethe's side. On December 15, 1825, in fact, he presents Goethe with a beautiful example that confirmed his discovery. A Hessian athlete sought help from Blumenbach's colleague Langenbeck for an “ os intermaxillare that was prominent in a quite animal-like way.” We still have to speak of later adherents of Goethe's ideas. But it should still be mentioned here that M.J. Weber succeeded, with diluted nitric acid, in separating from an upper jawbone an intermaxillary bone that had already grown into it. Goethe continued his study of bones even after completion of this treatise. The discoveries he was making at the same time in botany enliven his interest in nature even more. He is continually borrowing relevant objects from his friends. On December 7, 1785, Sömmerring is actually annoyed “that Goethe is not sending him back his heads.” From a letter of Goethe's to Sömmerring on June 8,1786 we learn that he still even then had skulls of his. In Italy also, his great ideas accompanied him. As the thought of the archetypal plant took shape in his spirit, he also arrives at concepts about man's form. On January 20, 1787, Goethe writes in Rome: “I am somewhat prepared for anatomy and have acquired, though not without effort, a certain level of knowledge of the human body. Here, through endless contemplation of statues, one's attention is continuously drawn to the human body, but in a higher way. The purpose of our medical and surgical anatomy is merely to know the part, and for this a stunted muscle will also serve. But in Rome, the parts mean nothing unless at the same time they present a noble and beautiful form. In the big hospital of San Spirito, they have set up for artists a very beautifully muscled body in such a way that the beauty of it makes one marvel. It could really be taken for a flayed demigod, a Marsyas. It is also the custom here, following the ancients, to study the skeleton not as an artificially arranged mass of bones but rather with the ligaments still attached, from which it receives some life and movement.” The main thing for Goethe here is to learn to know the laws by which nature forms organic shapes — and especially human ones — and to learn to know the tendency nature follows in forming them. On the one hand, Goethe is seeking within the series of endless plant shapes the archetypal plant with which one can endlessly invent more plants that must be consistent, i.e., that are fully in accordance with that tendency in nature and that would exist if suitable conditions were present; and on the other hand, Goethe was intent, with respect to the animals and man, upon “discovering the ideal characteristics” that are totally in accord with the laws of nature. Soon after his return from Italy, we hear that Goethe is “industriously occupied with anatomy,” and in 1789, he writes to Herder: “I have a newly discovered harmonium naturae to expound.” What is here described as newly discovered may be a part of his vertebral theory about the skull. The completion of this discovery, however, falls in the year 1790. What he knew up until then was that all the bones that form the back of the head represent three modified spinal vertebrae. Goethe conceived the matter in the following way. The brain represents merely a spinal cord mass raised to its highest level of perfection. Whereas in the spinal cord those nerves end and begin that serve primarily the lower organic functions, in the brain those nerves begin and end that serve higher (spiritual) functions, pre-eminently the sense nerves. In the brain there only appears in a developed form what already lies indicated in the spinal cord as possibility. The brain is a fully developed spinal cord; the spinal cord a brain that has not yet fully unfolded. Now the vertebrae of the spinal column are perfectly shaped in conformity with the parts of the spinal cord; the vertebrae are the organs needed to enclose them. Now it seems probable in the highest degree, that if the brain is a spinal cord raised to its highest potentiality, then the bones enclosing it are also only more highly developed vertebrae. The whole head appears in this way to be prefigured in the bodily organs that stand at a lower level. The forces that are already active on lower levels are at work here also, but in the head they develop to the highest potentiality lying within them. Again, Goethe's concern is only to find evidence as to how the matter actually takes shape in accordance with sense-perceptible reality. Goethe says that he recognized this relationship very soon with respect to the bone of the back of the head, the occiput, and to the posterior and anterior sphenoid bones; but that — during his trip to northern Italy when he found a cracked-open sheep's skull on the dunes of the Lido — he recognized that the palatal bone, the upper jaw, and the intermaxillary bone are also modified vertebrae. This skull had fallen apart so felicitously that the individual vertebrae were distinctly recognizable in the individual parts. Goethe's showed this beautiful discovery to Frau von Kalb on April 30, 1790 with the words: “Tell Herder that I have gotten one whole principle nearer to animal form and to its manifold transformations, and did so through the most remarkable accident.” This was a discovery of the most far-reaching significance. It showed that all the parts of an organic whole are identical with respect to idea, that “inwardly unformed” organic masses open themselves up outwardly in different ways, and that it is one and the same thing that — at a lower level as spinal cord nerve and on a higher level as sense nerve — opens itself up into the sense organ, that takes up, grasps, and apprehends the outer world. This discovery revealed every living thing in its power to form and give shape to itself from within outward; only then was it grasped as something truly living. Goethe's basic ideas, also in relation to animal development, had now attained their final form. The time had come to present these ideas in detail, although he had already planned to do this earlier, as Goethe's correspondence with F.H. Jacobi shows us. When he accompanied the Duke, in July 1790, to the Schlesian encampment, he occupied himself primarily there (in Breslau) with his studies on animal development. He also began there really to write down his thoughts on this subject. On August 31, 179(), he writes to Friedrich von Stein: “In all this bustle, I have begun to write my treatise on the development of the animals.” In a comprehensive sense, the idea of the animal typus is contained in the poem “Metamorphosis of the Animals,” which first appeared in 1820 in the second of the morphological notebooks. During the years 1790–95, Goethe's primary natural-scientific work was with his colour theory. At the beginning of 1795, Goethe was in Jena, where the brothers von Humboldt, Max Jacobi, and Schiller were also present. In this company, Goethe brought forward his ideas about comparative anatomy. His friends found his presentations so significant that they urged him to put his ideas down on paper. It is evident from a letter of Goethe to the elder Jacobi that Goethe complied with this urging right away, while still in Jena, by dictating to Max Jacobi the outline of a comparative osteology which is printed in the first volume of Goethe's natural-scientific writings in Kürschner's National Literature . In 1796, the introductory chapters were further elaborated. These treatises contain Goethe's basic views about animal development, just as his writing, “ An Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of the Plant ,” 30 “ Versuch, die Metamorphose der Pflanze zu erklären ” contains his basic views on plant development. Through communication with Schiller — since 1794 Goethe came to a turning point in his views, in that from now on, with respect to his own way of proceeding and of doing research, he began to observe himself, so that his way of viewing things became for him an object of study . After these historical reflections, let us now turn to the nature and significance of Goethe's views on the development of organisms.

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA001/English/MP1988/GA001_c03.html

How Goethe's Thoughts on the Development of the Animals Arose

GA001_c04

September 1925

Goethean Science

Dornach

The great significance of Goethe's morphological works is to be sought in the fact that in them the theoretical basis and method for studying organic entities are established, and this is a scientific deed of the first order . If one is to do justice to this rightly, one must above all bear in mind the great difference existing between the phenomena of inorganic nature and those of organic nature. A phenomenon of the first kind, for example, is the impact of two elastic balls upon one another. If one ball is at rest and the other ball strikes it from a certain direction and with a certain velocity, then the first ball is likewise given a certain direction and velocity. If it is a matter then of comprehending such a phenomenon, this can be achieved only by our transforming into concepts what is directly there for the senses. We would succeed in this to the extent that nothing of a sense-perceptibly real nature remained that we had not permeated conceptually. We see one ball approach and strike the other, which then goes on moving. We have comprehended this phenomenon when, from the mass, direction, and velocity of the first ball, and from the mass of the second, we can determine the direction and velocity of the second ball; when we see that under the given conditions this phenomenon must necessarily occur. But this means nothing other than: that which offers itself to our senses must appear as a necessary consequence of what we have to postulate ideally beforehand. If this is the case, then we can say that concept and phenomenon coincide. There is nothing in the concept that is not also in the phenomenon, and nothing in the phenomenon that is not also in the concept . Now we must take a closer look into those relationships out of which a phenomenon of inorganic nature occurs as a necessary consequence. The important fact arises here that the sense-perceptible processes of inorganic nature are determined by factors that likewise belong to the sense world. In our example, mass, velocity, and direction — i.e., exclusively factors belonging to the sense world — come into consideration. Nothing further arises as a determining factor for the phenomenon. It is only the directly sense-perceptible factors that determine one another . A conceptual grasp of such processes is therefore nothing other than a tracing of something sense-perceptibly real back to something sense-perceptibly real. Spatial-temporal relationships, mass, weight, or sense-perceptible forces such as light or warmth call forth phenomena that themselves belong in the same category. A body is heated and increases thereby in volume; the heating and the expanding both belong to the sense world; both the cause and the effect do so. We therefore do not need to go outside the sense world at all in order to comprehend such processes. We merely trace, within the sense world, one phenomenon back to another. When we therefore explain such a phenomenon, i.e., want to permeate it conceptually, we do not need to take up into the concept any elements other than those which are observably perceptible to our senses. We can observe everything that we want to comprehend. And the congruence of perception (phenomenon) and concept consists in this. Nothing in the processes remains obscure to us, because we know the relationships from which they follow. With this, we have elaborated upon the character of inorganic nature and have shown at the same time to what extent we can explain inorganic nature out of itself , without going out of or beyond it. Now one has never doubted this explainability, ever since one first began to think about the nature of these things. One has not, to be sure, always gone through the above train of thought from which the possibility of a congruence of concept and perception follows; but still one has never hesitated to explain phenomena out of the nature of their own being in the way indicated. 31 A few philosophers maintain that we can indeed trace the phenomena of the sense world back to their original elements (forces), but that we can explain these just as little as we can explain the nature of life. On the other hand, one can say that those elements are simple , i.e., cannot themselves be composed of still simpler elements. But to trace them, in all their simplicity, further back, to explain them, is an impossibility, not because our capacity for knowledge is limited, but rather because these elements rest upon themselves ; they are present for us in all their immediacy; they are self-contained, cannot be traced hack to anything else. But matters were different, up until Goethe , with respect to the phenomena of the organic world. In the case of an organism, sense-perceptible factors appear — form, size, colour, warmth conditions of an organ, for example — that are not determined by factors of the same kind. One cannot say of the plant, for example, that the size, form, location, etc., of the roots determine the sense-perceptible factors of the leaf or blossom. A body for which this were the case would not be an organism but rather a machine. It must be admitted that all the sense-perceptible factors of a living being do not manifest as a result of other sense-perceptible factors, 32 This is precisely the contrast between an organism and a machine. In a machine, everything is the interaction of its parts. Nothing real exists in the machine itself other than this interaction. The unifying principle, which governs the working together of the parts, is lacking in the object itself, and lies outside of it in the head of its builder as a plan. Only the most extreme short-sightedness can deny that the difference between an organism and a mechanism lies precisely in the fact that the principle causing the interrelationship of the parts is, with respect to a mechanism, present only externally (abstractly), whereas with respect to an organism, this principle gains real existence within the thing itself. Thus the sense-perceptible components of an organism also do not then appear out of one another as a mere sequence, but rather as though governed by that inner principle, as though resulting from such a principle that is no longer sense-perceptible. In this respect it is no more sense-perceptible than the plan in the builder's head that is also there only for the mind; this principle is, in fact, essentially that plan, only that plan has now drawn into the inner being of the entity and no longer carries out its activities through the mediation of a third party — the builder — but rather does this directly itself. as is the case with inorganic nature. On the contrary, in an organism, all sense-perceptible qualities manifest as the result of a factor that is no longer sense-perceptible . They manifest as the result of a higher unity hovering over the sense-perceptible processes. It is not the shape of the root which determines that of the trunk, nor the trunk's shape which determines that of the leaf, and so on, rather, all these forms are determined by something standing over them that itself is not again a form observable by the senses; these forms do exist for one another, but not as a result of one another. They do not mutually determine one another, but rather are all determined by something else. Here we cannot trace what we perceive with our senses back to other sense-perceptible factors; we must take up, into the concept of the processes, elements that do not belong to the world of the senses; we must go out of and beyond the sense world . Observation no longer suffices; we must grasp the unity conceptually if we want to explain the phenomena. Because of this, however, a separation occurs between observation and concept; they no longer seem to coincide with each other; the concept hovers over what is observed. It becomes difficult to see the connection. Whereas in inorganic nature concept and reality were one, here they seem to diverge and actually to belong to two different worlds. The observation that offers itself directly to the senses no longer seems to bear within itself its own basis, its own being. The object does not seem explainable out of itself, but rather from something else. Because the object appears in a way not governed by the laws of the sense world, but is there for the senses nevertheless, appears to the senses, it is then as though we stood here before an insoluble contradiction in nature, as though a chasm existed between inorganic phenomena, which are comprehensible through themselves, and organic beings, in which an intrusion into the laws of nature occurs, in which universally valid laws seem suddenly to be broken . Up until Goethe , in fact, science generally considered this chasm to exist; he was the first to succeed in speaking the word that solved the riddle. Before him, one thought that only inorganic nature was explainable out of itself; man's ability to know ceases when confronted by organic nature. One can best estimate the greatness of the deed Goethe accomplished when one considers that the great reformer of philosophy in recent time, Kant, not only shared completely in that old error, but even sought, in fact, to find a scientific foundation for the view that the human spirit will never succeed in explaining organic entities. He saw the possibility, to be sure, of an intellect — of an intellectus archetypus , of an intuitive intellect — to which it would be granted to see into the relationship of concept and reality in organic beings just as it does in inorganic things; only, he denied to man himself the possibility of any such intellect ( Verstand ). 33 Readers familiar with German philosophy in English will remember that the conventional translation of Verstand is “understanding.” — Ed. For Kant, it is supposedly characteristic of the human intellect that it can think of the unity, the concept of a thing, only as resulting from the interaction of its parts — as an analytical generalization gained by a process of abstraction — but not in such a way that each individual part manifests as the outflow of a definite concrete (synthetical) unity, of a concept in an intuitive form. For this reason, it is also supposedly impossible for the intellect to explain organic nature, because organic nature would have to be thought of, indeed, as working from the whole into the parts. Kant says about this: “It is characteristic of our intellect, therefore, with respect to our power of judgment, that it does not determine knowledge through itself, does not determine what is particular through what is general, and that therefore the particular cannot be traced back to the general.” 34 Critique of Judgment ( Kritik der Urteilskraft ) According to this, we would therefore have to renounce all knowledge, with regard to organic entities, of the necessary connection between the idea of the whole — which can only be thought — and what manifests to our senses in space and time. According to Kant, we must limit ourselves to the recognition that such a connection exists; but the logical challenge to know how the general thought, the idea, steps out of itself and manifests itself as sense-perceptible reality, this supposedly cannot be fulfilled with respect to organisms. Rather we would have to assume that concept and reality confront each other here without mediation; and that some influence lying outside them both creates them in somewhat the same way a person, according to an idea he has thought up, constructs some composite thing or other — a machine, for example. In this way the possibility of an explanation of the world of organisms was denied, its impossibility in fact seemingly proven. This is how matters stood when Goethe undertook to devote himself to the organic sciences. But he entered into these studies after preparing himself for them in a most appropriate way, through repeated readings of the philosopher Spinoza. Goethe took up Spinoza for the first time in the spring of 1774. In Poetry and Truth , he says of this, his first acquaintance with the philosopher: “That is, after vainly looking around in the whole world for a means of educating my strange being, I finally happened upon the Ethics of this man.” In the summer of the same year, Goethe met with Friedrich Jacobi. The latter, who had come more thoroughly to terms with Spinoza — as his letters of 1785 about Spinoza's teachings show — was entirely qualified to lead Goethe more deeply into the essential nature of the philosopher. Spinoza was also very much discussed at that time, for in Goethe “everything was still in its first effects and counter-effects, fermenting and seething.” Somewhat later, he found a book in his father's library whose author heatedly opposed Spinoza, even distorting him, in fact, into a total caricature. This gave Goethe the stimulus to occupy himself seriously once more with the profound thinker. In Spinoza's writings he found elucidation on the deepest scientific questions that he was then capable of raising. In 1784, the poet reads Spinoza with Frau von Stein. On November 19, 1784, he writes to her: “I am bringing Spinoza along in Latin, in which everything is much clearer ...” The effect of this philosopher upon Goethe was now immense. Goethe himself was always clear about this. In 1816, he writes to Zelter: “Except for Shakespeare and Spinoza, I do not know that any departed soul has had such an effect upon me (as Linnaeus).” He regards Shakespeare and Spinoza therefore as the two spirits who have exerted the greatest influence on him. The manner in which this influence now manifested itself with respect to his studies of organic development becomes clearest to us if we consider a statement about Lavater from Goethe's Italian Journey ; Lavater was also in fact a proponent of the view generally prevalent then that something living can arise only through an influence that does not lie in the nature of the entity itself, through a violation of the general laws of nature. Goethe then wrote the following words about this: “Recently I found, in a pitiful, apostolically monkish declamation of the Zürich prophet, the nonsensical words that everything that has life lives by something outside itself . Or it sounded something like that. Now a missionary can write down something like that, and when he is revising it no good spirit tugs at his sleeve.” Now that is expressed entirely in the spirit of Spinoza. Spinoza makes a distinction between three kinds of knowledge. The first kind is that in which upon hearing or reading certain words we recall certain things and form certain mental pictures of these things which are similar to the pictures by which we represent the things to ourselves pictorially. The second kind of knowledge is that in which, out of sufficient mental pictures of the characteristics of things, we form general concepts for ourselves. The third kind of knowledge, however, is that in which we advance from an adequate picture of the real being of certain attributes of God to an adequate knowledge of the being of things. Spinoza calls this kind of knowledge scientia intuitiva , knowledge in beholding . This last, the highest kind of knowledge, is that for which Goethe strove. One must above all be clear about what Spinoza meant by this The things are to be known in such a way that we recognize within their being certain attributes of God. Spinoza's God is the idea-content of the world, the driving principle that supports and carries everything. Now one can picture this either in such a way that one takes this principle to be an independent being — existing by itself, separated off from finite beings — that has these finite things outside itself, governs them, and causes them to interact. Or, on the other hand, one can picture this being as having merged into finite things in such a way that it is no longer over and outside them, but rather now exists only within them. This view in no way denies that primal principle; it acknowledges it entirely; only, it regards this principle as having been poured out into the world. The first view regards the finite world as a manifestation of the infinite, but this infinite remains with its own being intact; it relinquishes nothing of itself. It does not go out of itself; it remains what it was before it manifested itself. The second view also regards the finite world as a manifestation of the infinite, only it assumes that this infinite, in becoming manifest, has gone entirely out of itself, has laid itself, its own being and life, into its creation in such a way that it now exists only within this creation . Now since our activity of knowing is obviously a becoming aware of the essential being of things, and since this being can after all consist only in the involvement a finite being has in the primal principle of all things, our activity of knowing must then mean a becoming aware of that infinite within the things. 35 Certain attributes of God within the things. Now, as we have described above, it was readily assumed, before Goethe, with respect to inorganic nature, that one could explain it out of itself, that it carries within itself its own substantiation and essential being, but that this is not the case with organic nature. Here one could not know, within an object itself, that essential being that manifests itself within the object. One therefore assumed this being to be outside the object. In short: one explained organic nature according to the first view and inorganic nature according to the second. As we have seen, Spinoza had proven the necessity for a unified knowledge. He was too much the philosopher to have been able also to extend this theoretical requirement out over the specialized area of organic science. It remained for Goethe to do this now. Not only his statement about Spinoza quoted above, but also numerous others show us that Goethe adhered decisively to Spinoza's views. In Poetry and Truth : “Nature works according to laws that are eternal, necessary, and so divine that even the Divinity Himself could change nothing about them.” And, in connection with Jacobi's book, Of Divine Things and their Manifestation , 36 Von den göttlichen Dingen and ihrer Offenbarung ( 1811 ) Goethe remarks: “How could the book of such a beloved friend be welcome to me when I had to see developed in it the thesis that nature conceals God. With my pure, deep, inborn, and trained way of looking at things, which had taught me absolutely to see God in nature, nature in God , such that this way of picturing things constituted the foundation of my whole existence, would not such a peculiar, one-sidedly limited statement estrange me forever in spirit from this most noble man whose heart I revered and loved?” Goethe was completely conscious of the great step he was taking in science; he recognized that by breaking down the barriers between inorganic and organic nature and by consistently carrying through on Spinoza's way of thinking, he was giving science a significant turn. We find his knowledge of this fact expressed in his essay Power to Judge in Beholding ( Anschauende Urteilskraft ). After he had found, in the Critique of Judgment , the Kantian establishment of the in ability of the human intellect to explain an organism, as we described above, Goethe expresses his opposition to it in this way: “To be sure, the author (Kant) seems here to point to a divine intellect; but when we, in fact, lift ourselves in the moral sphere into a higher region through belief in God, virtue, and immortality and mean to draw near to the primal being, so likewise, in the intellectual realm, it could very well be the case that we would make ourselves worthy, through beholding an ever-creating nature, of participating spiritually in its productions. Since I had, after all, ceaselessly pressed on, at first unconsciously and out of an inner urge, toward that primal archetypal element, since I had even succeeded in building up a presentation of this which was in accordance with nature, nothing more could keep me then from courageously under taking the adventure of reason , as the old man of Königsberg himself calls it.” The essential thing about a process of inorganic nature — a process belonging merely to the sense world, in other words — consists in the fact that it is caused and determined by another process which likewise belongs only to the sense world. Let us assume now that the causal process consists of the elements m, d, and v (mass, direction, and velocity of a moving elastic ball) and that the resulting process consists of the elements m', d', and v'; then what m, d, and v are will always determine what m', d', and v' are. If I now want to comprehend the process, I must represent the whole process, consisting of cause and effect, in one common concept. But this concept is not of such a sort that it could lie within the process itself and determine the process. The concept now brings both processes together into one common expression: It does not cause and determine. Only the objects of the sense world determine each other. The elements m, d, and v are elements that are also perceptible to the external senses. The concept appears there only in order to serve man's spirit as a means of drawing things together; it expresses something that is not ideally, conceptually real, but rather is sense-perceptibly real. And that something which it expresses is a sense-perceptible object. Knowledge of inorganic nature is based upon the possibility of grasping the outer world through the senses and of expressing its interactions through concepts. Kant saw the possibility of knowing things in this way as the only way man has. He called this thinking “ discursive .” What we want to know is an external perception; the concept, the unity that draws things together, is merely a means. But if we wanted to know organic nature, we would then have to consider the ideal element, the conceptual factor, not as something that expresses or signifies something else, but rather we would have to know the ideal element as such ; it would have to have a content of its own, stemming from itself, and not from the spatial-temporal world of the senses. That unity which, in inorganic nature, man's spirit merely abstracts from the world, would have to build upon itself, would have to develop itself out of its own self , would have to be fashioned in accordance with its own being and not according to the influences of other objects. Man is supposedly denied the ability to apprehend such an entity as this that develops itself out of itself and that manifests itself out of its own power. Now what is necessary for such an apprehension? A power of judgment that can impart to a thought yet another substance ( Stoff ) than one merely taken up by the outer senses, a power of judgment that can apprehend not merely what is sense-perceptible, but also what is purely ideal, by itself, separated from the sense world. Now one can call a concept that is not taken from the sense world by abstraction, but rather has a content flowing out of itself and only out of itself, an “ intuitive concept ” and knowledge of this concept an “intuitive” one. What follows from this is clear: An organism can be apprehended only in an intuitive concept . Goethe shows, through what he does, that it is granted to the human being to know in this way. What prevails in the inorganic world is the interaction of the parts of a series of phenomena; it is their reciprocal determining of each other. This is not the case in the organic world. There, one part of an entity does not determine the other, but rather the whole (the idea), out of itself and in accordance with its own being, determines each individual part. One can follow Goethe in calling this self-determining whole an “ entelechy .” An entelechy is therefore a power that, out of itself, calls itself into existence. What comes into manifestation also has a sense-perceptible existence, but this is determined by that entelechical principle. From this also arises the seeming contradiction. An organism determines itself out of itself, fashions its characteristics in accordance with a presupposed principle, and yet it is sense-perceptibly real. It has therefore arrived at its sense-perceptible reality in a completely different way than the other objects of the sense world; thus it seems to have arisen in an unnatural way. But it is also entirely explainable that an organism, in its externality, is just as susceptible to the influences of the sense world as is any other body. The stone falling from a roof can strike a living entity just as well as an inorganic object. An organism is connected with the outer world through its intake of nourishment, etc.; all the physical circumstances of the outer world affect it. Of course this can also occur only insofar as the organism is an object of the sense world, a spatial-temporal object. This object of the outer world then, this entelechical principle that has come into existence, is the outer manifestation of the organism. But since the organism is subject not only to its own laws of development but also to the conditions of the outer world, since it is not only what it should be in accordance with the being of the self-determining entelechical principle, but also is what other dependencies and influences have made it, therefore the organism never seems, as it were, to accord fully with itself, never seems obedient merely to its own being. Here human reason enters and forms for itself, in idea , an organism that is not in accordance with the influences of the outer world, but rather corresponds only to that entelechical principle. Every coincidental influence that has nothing to do with the organism as such falls away entirely here. This idea, now, that corresponds purely to what is organic in the organism is the idea of the archetypal organism; it is Goethe's typus . From this one can also see the great justification for this idea of the typus . This idea is not merely an intellectual concept ; it is what is truly organic in every organism, without which an organism would not be one. This idea is, in fact, more real than any individual real organism, because it manifests itself in every organism. It also expresses the essential nature of an organism more fully , more purely than any individual, particular organism. It is acquired in an essentially different way than the concept of an inorganic process. This latter is drawn from, abstracted from, reality; it is not at work within reality; the idea of the organism, however, is active, is at work as entelechy within the organism; it is, in the form grasped by our reason, only the being of the entelechy itself. This idea does not draw the experience together; it brings about what is to be experienced. Goethe expresses this in the following words: “Concept is summation , idea is result of experience; to find the sum requires intellect; to grasp the result requires reason” ( Aphorisms in Prose ). This explains that kind of reality which belongs to the Goethean archetypal organism (archetypal plant or archetypal animal). This Goethean method is clearly the only possible one by which to penetrate into the essential nature of the world of organisms. With respect to the inorganic, the fact should be regarded as essential that the phenomenon, in all its manifoldness, is not identical with the lawfulness that explains it, but rather points, merely, to this lawfulness as to something external to it. The observation (the material element of knowledge, given us by the outer senses) and the concept (the formal element, by which we recognize the observation as necessitated) confront each other as two elements that objectively require each other, it is true; but they do so in such a way that the concept does not lie within the individual parts of a series of phenomena themselves but rather within a relationship of these parts to each other. This relationship, which brings the manifoldness into a unified whole, is founded within the individual parts of the given, but as a whole (as a unity) it does not come to real, concrete manifestation. Only the parts of this relationship come to outer existence — in the object. The unity, the concept, first comes to manifestation as such within our intellect. The intellect has the task of drawing together the manifoldness of the phenomenon; it relates itself to the manifoldness as its sum . We have to do here with a duality: with the manifold thing that we observe , and with the unity that we think . In organic nature the parts of the manifoldness of an entity do not stand in such an external relationship to each other. The unity comes into reality in the observed entity simultaneously with the manifoldness, as something identical with the manifoldness. The relationship of the individual parts of a phenomenal whole (an organism) has become a real one. It no longer comes to concrete manifestation merely within our intellect, but rather within the object itself, and in the object it brings forth the manifoldness out of itself. The concept does not have the role merely of summation, of being a combiner that has its object outside itself; the concept has become completely one with the object. What we observe is no longer different from that by which we think the observed; we are observing the concept as the idea itself. Therefore, Goethe calls the ability by which we comprehend organic nature the power to judge in beholding ( Anschauende Urteilskraft ). What explains (the formal element of knowledge, the concept) and what is explained (the material, the beheld) are identical. The idea by which we grasp the organic is therefore essentially different from the concept by which we explain the inorganic; the idea does not merely draw together — like a sum — a given manifoldness, but rather sets forth its own content out of itself. The idea is the result of the given (of experience), is concrete manifestation. Herein lies the reason why in inorganic natural science we speak of laws (natural laws) and explain the facts by them, and in organic nature, on the other hand, we do this by types . The law is not one and the same with the manifoldness of the observed that the law governs; the law stands over it; in the typus , however, the ideal element and the real element have become a unity; the manifoldness can be explained only as going forth from a point of the whole, the whole that is identical with the manifoldness. In Goethe's knowledge of this relationship between the science of the inorganic and that of the organic lies what is so significant in his research. One is in error, therefore, when today one often explains his research as a forerunner of that monism which wants to found a unified view of nature — comprising both the organic and the inorganic — by endeavoring to trace what is organic back to the same laws (mechanical-physical categories and laws of nature) by which the inorganic is determined. We have seen how Goethe conceives a monistic view to be. The way he explains the organic is essentially different from the way he proceeds with respect to the inorganic. He wants to be sure that the mechanistic way of explaining things is strictly avoided with respect to what is of a higher nature (see his Aphorisms in Prose ). He criticizes Kieser and Link for wanting to trace organic phenomena back to inorganic activity. What gave rise to the erroneous view about Goethe indicated above was the relationship into which he brought himself to Kant with respect to the possibility of a knowledge of organic nature. But when Kant asserts that our intellect is not able to explain organic nature, he certainly does not mean by this that organic nature rests upon mechanical lawfulness and that he is only unable to grasp it as resulting from mechanical-physical categories. For Kant, the reason for this inability lies, rather, precisely in the fact that our intellect can explain only mechanical-physical things and that the being of the organism is not of this nature. Were it so, then the intellect, by virtue of the categories at its command, could very well grasp its being. It is definitely not Goethe's thought now to explain the organic world as a mechanism in spite of Kant; but rather he maintains that we by no means lack the ability to know that higher kind of nature's working which establishes the essential being of the organic. As we consider what has just been said, we are confronted right away by an essential difference between inorganic and organic nature. Since in inorganic nature any process whatever can cause another, and this in turn yet another, and so on, the sequence of occurrences seems nowhere to be a closed one. Everything is in continuous interaction, without any one particular group of objects being able to close itself off from the effects of others. The sequences of inorganic activity have nowhere a beginning nor an end; there is only a chance connection between one happening and the next. If a stone falls to earth, the effect it produces depends upon the chance form of the object on which it falls. It is a different matter now with an organism. Here the unity is primary. The entelechy, built upon itself, comprises a number of sense-perceptible developmental forms of which one must be the first and another the last; in which one form can always only follow the other in an altogether definite way. The ideal unity puts forth out of itself a series of sense-perceptible organs in a certain sequence in time and in a particular spatial relationship, and closes itself off in an altogether definite way from the rest of nature. It puts forth its various states out of itself. These can therefore also be grasped only when one studies the development of successive states as they emerge from an ideal unity; i.e., an organic entity can be understood only in its becoming, in its developing. An inorganic body is closed off, rigid, can only be moved from outside, is inwardly immobile. An organism is restlessness within itself, ever transforming it self from within, changing, producing metamorphoses. The following statements of Goethe refer to this: “Reason is oriented toward what is becoming, the intellect toward what has become; the former does not bother itself about purpose ( wozu ?); the latter does not ask about origin ( woher ?). Reason rejoices in development; intellect wishes to hold everything fixed in order to use it” ( Aphorisms in Prose ) and: “Reason has rulership only over what is living; the world that has already come about, with which geognosy concerns itself, is dead.” ( Ibid. ) The organism confronts us in nature in two main forms: as plant and as animal, in a different way in each. The plant differs from the animal in its lack of any real inner life. This last manifests in the animal as sensation, arbitrary movement, etc. The plant has no such soul principle. It still consists entirely in its externality, in its form . By determining its life, as it were, out of one point, that entelechical principle confronts us in the plant in such a way that all its individual organs are formed according to the same developmental principle. The entelechy manifests here as the developmental force of the individual organs. These last are all fashioned according to one and the same developmental type; they manifest as modifications of one basic organ, as a repetition of this organ at different levels of development. What makes the plant into a plant, a certain form-creating force , is at work in every organ in the same way. Every organ appears therefore as identical to all the others and also to the whole plant. Goethe expresses this as follows: “I have realized, namely, that in that organ of the plant which we are usually accustomed to address as ‘leaf,’ the true Proteus lies hidden that can conceal and reveal itself in every formation. Anyway you look at it, the plant is always only leaf, so inseparably joined with the future germ ( Keim ) that one cannot think the one without the other.” ( Italian Journey ) Thus the plant appears, as it were, composed of nothing but individual plants, as a complex individual consisting in turn of simpler ones. The development of the plant progresses therefore from level to level and forms organs; each organ is identical to every other, i.e., similar in formative principle, different in appearance. The inner unity spreads itself out, as it were, in the plant; it expresses itself in manifoldness, loses itself in this manifoldness in such a way that it does not gain — as the animal does, as we will see later — a concrete existence which is endowed with a certain independence and which, as a center of life, confronts the manifoldness of the organs and uses them as mediators with the outer world. The question now arises: What brings about that difference in the appearance of plant organs which, according to their inner principle, are identical? How is it possible for developmental laws that all work according to one formative principle to bring forth at one time a leaf and at another a petal? In the case of plant life, which lies entirely in the realm of the external, this differentiation can also be based only upon external, i.e., spatial, factors. Goethe regards an alternating expansion and contraction as just such external factors. As the entelechical principle of plant life, working out from one point, comes into existence, it manifests itself as something spatial; the formative forces work in space. They create organs with definite spatial forms. Now these forces either concentrate themselves, they strive to come together, as it were, into one single point (this is the stage of contraction); or they spread themselves out, unfold themselves, seek in a certain way to distance themselves from each other (this is the stage of expansion). In the whole life of the plant, three expansions alternate with three contractions. Everything that enters as differentiation into the plant's formative forces which in their essential nature are identical — stems from this alternating expansion and contraction. At first the whole plant, in all its potential, rests, drawn together into one point, in the seed (a). It then comes forth and unfolds itself, spreads itself out in leaf-formation (c). The formative forces thrust themselves apart more and more; therefore the lower leaves appear still raw, compact (cc'); the further up the stem they are, the more ribbed and indented they become. What formerly was still pressing together now separates (leaf d and e). What earlier stood at successive intervals (zz') from each other appears again in one point of the stem (w) in the calyx (f). This is the second contraction. In the corolla, an unfolding, a spreading out , occurs again. Compared with the sepals, the petals (g) are finer and more delicate, which can only be due to a lesser intensity at one point, i.e., be due to a greater extension of the formative forces. The next contraction occurs in the reproductive organs (stamens (h), and pistil (i)), after which a new expansion takes place in the fruiting (k). In the seed (a) that emerges from the fruit, the whole being of the plant again appears contracted to a point. 37 The fruit arises through the growth of the lower part of the pistil, the ovary (1); it represents a later stage of the pistil and can therefore only be sketched separately. With the fruiting, the last expansion occurs. The life of the plant differentiates itself into an organ — the actual fruit — that is closing itself off, and into the seeds; in the fruit, all the factors of the phenomenon are united, as it were; it is mere phenomenon, it estranges itself from life, becomes a dead product. In the seed are concentrated all the inner essential factors of the plant's life. From it a new plant arises. It has become almost entirely ideal; the phenomenon is reduced to a minimum in it. The whole plant represents only an unfolding, a realization, of what rests in the bud or in the seed as potentiality. Bud and seed need only the appropriate external influences in order to become fully developed plant forms. The only difference between bud and seed is that the latter has the earth directly as the basis of its unfolding, whereas the former generally represents a plant formation upon the plant itself. The seed represents a plant individuality of a higher kind, or, if you will, a whole cycle of plant forms. With the forming of every bud, the plant begins a new stage of its life, as it were; it regenerates itself, concentrates its forces in order to unfold them again anew. The forming of a bud is therefore an interruption of vegetation. The plant's life can contract itself into a bud when the conditions for actual real life are lacking, in order then to unfold itself anew when such conditions do occur. The interruption of vegetation in winter is based on this. Goethe says about this: “It is very interesting to observe how a vegetation works that is actively continued and uninterrupted by severe cold; here there are no buds, and one only learns now to comprehend what a bud is.” 38 Italian Journey , December 1,1786. What lies hidden in the bud where we are is open to the day there; what lies within the bud, therefore, is true plant life; only the conditions for its unfolding are lacking. Goethe's concept of alternating expansion and contraction has met with especially strong opposition. All the attacks on it, however, originate from a misunderstanding. One believes that these concepts could be valid only if a physical cause could be found for them, only if one could demonstrate a way of working of the laws at work in the plant from which such expansion and contraction could proceed. This only shows that one is setting the matter down on its tip instead of its base. There is not something there that causes the contraction and expansion; on the contrary, everything else is the result of these; they cause a progressive metamorphosis from stage to stage. One is just not able to picture the concept in its own characteristic form, in its intuitive form; one requires that the concept represent the result of an external process. One can only think of expansion and contraction as caused and not as causing. Goethe does not look upon expansion and contraction as resulting from the nature of the inorganic processes occurring in the plant; rather he regards them as the way that inner entelechical principle shapes itself. He could therefore not view them as a sum, as a drawing together, of sense-perceptible processes and deduce them from such processes, but rather had to see them as proceeding from the inner unified principle itself. The plant's life is maintained by metabolism. With respect to this, an essential difference sets in between those organs closer to the root — i.e., to that organ which sees to the taking in of nourishment from the earth — and those organs that receive the nourishment which has already passed through the other organs. The former appear directly dependent upon their external inorganic environment; the latter, on the other hand, upon the organic parts that precede them. Each subsequent organ thus receives a nourishment prepared, as it were, for it by the preceding organ. Nature progresses from seed to fruit through a series of stages in such a way that what follows appears as the result of what precedes. And Goethe calls this progressing a progressing upon a spiritual ladder . Nothing more than what we have indicated lies in his words, “that an upper node — through the fact that it arises out of the preceding one and receives its sap indirectly through it — must receive its sap in a more refined and more filtered state, must also enjoy the effects of what the leaves have done with the sap in the meantime, must develop itself more finely and bring a finer sap to its leaves and buds.” All these things become comprehensible when one applies to them the meaning intended by Goethe. The ideas presented here are the elements inherent in the being of the archetypal plant — inherent in a way that conforms, in fact, only to this archetypal plant itself, and not as these elements manifest in any given plant where they no longer conform to their original state but rather to external conditions. Something different occurs now, to be sure, in animal life. Life does not lose itself here in its external features, but rather separates itself, detaches itself from its corporeality and uses its corporeal manifestation only as a tool. It no longer expresses itself as the mere ability to shape an organism from within outward, but rather expresses itself within an organism as something that is still there besides the organism, as its ruling power. The animal appears as a self-contained world, a microcosm in a much higher sense than the plant. It has a centre that each organ serves. Thus is every mouth adept at grasping the food That is right for the body, be now weak and toothless The jaw, or mighty with teeth; in every instance An adept organ conveys food to each member. Also every foot does move — be it long or a short one — All harmonious to the sense and need of the creature. In the case of the plant, the whole plant is in every organ, but the life principle exists nowhere as a particular center; the identity of the organs lies in their being formed according to the same laws. In the case of the animal, every organ appears as coming from that center; the center shapes all organs in accordance with its own nature. The form of the animal is therefore the basis for its external existence. This form, however, is determined from within. The way an animal lives must therefore take its direction from those inner formative principles. On the other hand, the inner development in itself is unrestricted, free; within certain limits, it can adapt itself to outer influences; but this development is still determined by the inner nature of the typus and not by mechanical influences from outside. Adaptation cannot therefore go so far as to make an organism seem to be only a product of the outer world. Its development is restricted to certain limits. These limits no god can extend; nature honors them; For only thus restricted was ever the perfect possible. If every animal being existed only in accordance with the principles lying within the archetypal animal, then they would all be alike. But the animal organism members itself into a number of organ systems, each of which can arrive at a definite degree of development. This is the basis now for a diverse evolution. Equally valid among the others as idea, one system can nevertheless push itself forward to a particular degree; it can use for itself the supply of formative forces lying within the animal organism and can deprive the other organs of it. The animal will thus appear as particularly developed in the direction of that organ system. Another animal will appear as developed in another direction. Herein lies the possibility for the differentiation of the archetypal organism in its transition to the phenomenal realm in genera and species. The real (factual) causes of this differentiation, however, are still not yet given thereby. Here adaptation and the struggle for existence come into their own right — the former causing the organism to shape itself in accordance with the outer conditions surrounding it, the latter working in such a way that only those entities survive that are best adapted to existing conditions. Adaptation and the struggle for existence, however, could have absolutely no effect upon the organism if the constituting principle of the organism were not of such a kind that — while continuously maintaining its inner unity — it can take on the most manifold forms. The relationship of outer formative forces to this principle should in no way be regarded as one in which, for example, the former determine the latter in the same way one inorganic entity determines another. The outer conditions are, to be sure, the stimulus for the typus to develop in a certain form; but this form itself cannot be derived from the outer determining factors, but only from the inner principle. In explaining the form, one should always seek the outer factors, but one should not regard the form itself as resulting from them . Goethe would have rejected the derivation of the developmental forms of an organism from the surrounding outer world through mere causality, just as much as he rejected the teleological principle according to which the form of an organ is traced back to an external purpose it is to serve. In the case of those organ systems of an animal in which what matters is more the external aspect of the structure — in the bones, for example — there that law which we saw in the plants appears again, as in the forming of the skull bones. Goethe's gift for recognizing the inner lawfulness in purely external forms manifests here quite especially. The difference between plant and animal established by these views of Goethe might seem meaningless in face of the fact that modern science has grounds for justifiable doubt that there is any definite borderline between plant and animal. Goethe, however, was already aware of the impossibility of setting up any such borderline. In spite of this, there are specific definitions of plant and animal. This is connected with Goethe's whole view of nature. He assumes absolutely nothing constant, fixed, in the phenomenal realm ; for in this realm everything fluctuates in continuous motion. But the essential being of a thing , which can be held fast in a concept, cannot be derived from the fluctuating forms, but rather from certain intermediary stages at which this being can be observed. For Goethe's view, it is quite natural that one set up specific definitions and that these are nevertheless not held to in one's experience of certain transitional forms. In fact, he sees precisely in this the mobile life of nature. With these ideas, Goethe established the theoretical foundations of organic science. He found the essential being of the organism. One can easily fail to recognize this if one demands that the typus , that self-constituted principle (entelechy), itself be explained by something else. But this is an unfounded demand, because the typus , held fast in its intuitive form, explains itself. For anyone who has grasped that “forming of itself in accordance with itself” of the entelechical principle, this constitutes the solution of the riddle of life. Any other solution is impossible, because this solution is the essential being of the thing itself. If Darwinism has to presuppose an archetypal organism, then one can say of Goethe that he discovered the essential being of that archetypal organism. 39 In modern natural science one usually means by “archetypal organism” ( Urorganismus ) an archetypal cell (archetypal cytode), i.e., a simple entity standing at the lowest level of organic development. One has in mind here a quite specific, actual, sense-perceptibly real entity. When one speaks in the Goethean sense about the archetypal organism, then one does not have this in mind but rather that essence (being), that formative entelechical principle which brings it about that this archetypal cell is an organism. This principle comes to manifestation in the simplest organism just as in the most perfect one, only differently developed. It is the animalness in the animal; it is that through which an entity is an organism. Darwin presupposes it from the beginning; it is there, is introduced, and then he says of it that it reacts in one way or another to the influences of the outer world. For him, it is an indefinite X; Goethe seeks to explain this indefinite X. It is Goethe who broke with the mere juxtaposing of genera and species, and who undertook a regeneration of organic science in accordance with the essential being of the organism. Whereas the systems before Goethe needed just as many different concepts (ideas) as there were outwardly different species for which no intermediary existed, Goethe maintained that in idea all organisms are alike, that they are different only in their manifestation; and he explained why they are so. With this, the philosophical foundation for a scientific system of organisms was created. It was then only a matter of implementing this system. It would have to be shown how all real organisms are only manifestations of an idea, and how they manifest themselves in a given case. The great deed thus accomplished for science was also widely acknowledged by those more educated in the field. The younger d'Alton writes to Goethe on July 6, 1827: “I would regard it as my greatest reward if Your Excellency, whom natural science has to thank not only for a total transformation through magnificent perspectives and new views in botany, but also for many first-rate contributions to the field of osteology, should recognize in the accompanying pages an endeavor worthy of praise.” Nees von Esenbeck, on June 24, 1820, wrote: “In your book, which you called An Attempt to Explain the Metamorphosis of Plants , the plant has spoken about itself among us for the first time, and, in this beautiful anthropomorphism, also captivated me while I was still young.” And finally Voigt, on June 6, 1831: “With lively interest and humble thanks I have received your little book on metamorphosis, which now so obligingly includes me historically also as one of the early adherents of this theory. It is strange: one is fairer toward animal metamorphosis — I do not mean the old metamorphosis of the insects, but rather the new kind about the vertebrae — than toward plant metamorphosis. Apart from the plagiarisms and misuses, the silent recognition of animal metamorphosis may rest on the belief that one was risking less there. For, in the skeleton the separate bones remain ever the same, whereas in botany, metamorphosis threatens to topple the whole terminology and consequently the determining of species , and there weak people are afraid, because they do not know where something like that might lead.” Here there is complete understanding for Goethe's ideas. The awareness is there that a new way of viewing what is individual must take place; and the new systematics, the study of particulars, should only first proceed then from this new view. The self-supporting typus contains the possibility of assuming endlessly manifold forms as it enters into manifestation; and these forms are the object of our sense perception, are the genera and species of the organism living in space and time. Insofar as our spirit apprehends that general idea, the typus , it has grasped the whole realm of organisms in all its unity. When now our spirit beholds the development of the typus in each particular form of manifestation, this form becomes comprehensible to it; this form appears to our spirit as one of the stages, one of the metamorphoses, in which the typus realizes itself. And the nature of the systematics to be founded by Goethe was to consist in demonstrating these different stages. In the animal, as well as in the plant realm, there holds sway an ascending evolutionary sequence; organisms are divided into highly developed and undeveloped ones. How is this possible? It is characteristic of the ideal form of the typus of the organisms, in fact, that it consists of spatial and temporal elements. For this reason, it also appeared to Goethe as a sensible-supersensible form. It contains spatial temporal forms as ideal perception (intuitive). When the typus now enters into manifestation, the truly (no longer intuitive) sense-perceptible form can correspond fully to that ideal form or not; the typus can come to its full development or not. The lower organisms are indeed lower through the fact that their form of manifestation does not fully correspond with the organic typus . The more that outer manifestation and organic typus coincide in a given entity, the more highly developed it is. This is the objective basis of an ascending evolutionary sequence. It is the task of any systematics to demonstrate this relationship with respect to the form of every organism. In arriving at the typus , the archetypal organism, however, no account can be taken of this; in arriving at the typus it can only be a matter of finding a form that represents the most perfect expression of the typus . Goethe's archetypal plant is meant to provide such a form. One has reproached Goethe for taking no account of the world of cryptogamia in arriving at his typus . We have indicated earlier that this could only have been so out of the fullest consciousness, since he did occupy himself also with the study of these plants. This does have its objective basis, however. The cryptogamia are in fact those plants in which the archetypal plant only comes to expression in a highly one sided way; they represent the idea of the plant in a one-sided sense-perceptible form. They can be judged according to the idea thus set up; but this idea itself only bursts forth fully in the phanerogamia. But what is to be said here is that Goethe never accomplished this implementation of his basic thought, that he entered too little into the realm of the particular. Therefore all his works remain fragmentary. His intention of also shedding light here is shown by his words in the Italian Journey (September 27, 1786) to the effect that it will be possible, with the help of his ideas, “truly to determine genera and species, which until now has occurred in a very arbitrary way, it seems to me.” He did not carry out this intention, did not make a specific presentation of the connection of his general thoughts to the realm of the particular, to the reality of the individual forms. This he himself regarded as a deficiency in his fragments; with respect to this he writes to Soret von de Candolle on June 28, 1828: “It is also becoming more and more clear to me how he regards my intentions, in which I am persisting and which, in my short essay on metamorphosis, are stated definitely enough, it is true, but whose connection with botany based on perception does not emerge clearly enough, as I have known for a long time .” This is certainly also the reason why Goethe's views were so misunderstood; they were misunderstood only because they were not understood at all. In Goethe's concepts we also gain an ideal explanation for the fact, discovered by Darwin and Haeckel, that the developmental history of the individual represents a repetition of the history of the race. For, what Haeckel puts forward here cannot after all be taken for anything more than an unexplained fact. It is the fact that every individual entity passes, in a shortened form, through all those stages of development that paleontology also shows us as separate organic forms. Haeckel and his followers explain this by the law of heredity. But heredity is itself nothing other than an abbreviated expression for the fact just mentioned. The explanation for it is that those forms, as well as those of the individual, are the manifest forms of one and the same archetypal image that, in successive epochs, brings to unfoldment the formative forces lying within this image as potentiality. Every higher entity is indeed more perfect through the fact that, through the favorable influences of its environment, it is not hindered in the completely free unfolding of itself in accordance with its inner nature. If, on the other hand, because of certain influences, the individual is compelled to remain at a lower stage, then only some of its inner forces come to manifestation, and then that which is only a part of a whole in a more highly developed individual is this individual's whole. And in this way the higher organism appears in its development as composed of the lower organisms, or too the lower organisms appear in their development as parts of the higher one. In the development of a higher animal, we must therefore also see again the development of all the lower ones (biogenetic law). Just as the physicist is not satisfied with merely stating and describing-facts, but also seeks out their laws — i.e., the concepts of the phenomena — so, for the person who wants to penetrate into the nature of organic entities, it also does not suffice for him merely to cite the facts of kinship, heredity, struggle for existence, etc.; but rather he wants to know the ideas underlying these things. We find this striving in Goethe. What Kepler's three laws are for the physicist, Goethe's ideas of the typus are for the organic scientist. Without them, the world is a mere labyrinth of facts for us. This has often been misunderstood. One declares that the concept of metamorphosis in Goethe's sense is merely a picture that basically occurs only in our intellect through abstraction. That Goethe was not clear about the fact that the concept of the transformation of leaves into flower organs makes sense only if the latter, the stamens, for example, were once real leaves. However, this turns Goethe's view upside down. A sense-perceptible organ is turned into a principally primary one and the other organ is then derived from it in a sense-perceptible way. Goethe never meant it this way. For him, what is first in time is absolutely not also first with respect to the idea, to the principle. It is not because the stamens were once true leaves that they are now related to the leaves; no, but rather because they are related ideally, in accordance with their inner nature, they appeared at one time as true leaves. The sense-perceptible transformation is only the result of the ideal relatedness and not the other way around. Today, it is an established empirical fact that all the lateral organs of the plant are identical; but why does one call them identical? According to Schleiden, because these all develop on the axis in such a way that they are pushed forth as lateral protuberances, in such a way that lateral cell formation remains only on the original body and that no new cells form on the tip that is formed first. This is a purely external relatedness, and one considers the idea of identity to be the result of this. Again the matter is otherwise for Goethe. For him the lateral organs are identical in their idea, in their inner being; therefore they also manifest outwardly as identical formations. For him, sense-perceptible relatedness is a result of inner, ideal relatedness. The Goethean conception differs from the materialistic one in the way it poses its questions; the two do not contradict one another; they complement one another. Goethe's ideas provide the foundation for the other view. Goethe's ideas are not merely a poetic foreshadowing of later discoveries but rather independent principle discoveries that have not by far been valued enough and upon which natural science will still draw for a long time. Even when the empirical facts that he used shall have been far surpassed, or in part even disproven, by more exact and detailed research. still the ideas he set up are fundamental once and for all for organic science, because they are independent of those empirical facts. Just as, according to Kepler's laws, every newly discovered planet must revolve around its star, so must every process in organic nature occur according to Goethe's ideas. Long before Kepler and Copernicus, people saw the occurrences in the starry heavens. These two first found the laws. Long before Goethe, people observed the realm of organic nature; Goethe found its laws. Goethe is the Copernicus and Kepler of the organic world . One can also clarify for oneself the nature of the Goethean theory in the following way. Besides ordinary empirical mechanics, which only collects the facts, there is also a rational mechanics, which, from the inner nature of the basic mechanical principles, deduces the a priori laws as necessary ones. As empirical mechanics relates to rational mechanics, so the theories of Darwin, Haeckel, etc., relate to the rational organic science of Goethe. About this aspect of his theory, Goethe was not at once clear from the beginning. Later, to be sure, he expressed it quite emphatically. When he writes to Heinrich Wilhelm Ferdinand Wackenroder, on January 21, 1832: “Continue to acquaint me with everything that interests you; it will connect somewhere with my reflections ,” he means by this only that he has found the basic principles of organic science from which everything else must be derived. At an earlier time, however, this all worked unconsciously in his spirit and he just treated the facts according to it. 40 Goethe often experienced this unconscious behavior of his as dullness. It first became objectively clear to him through that first scientific conversation with Schiller which we will describe later. Schiller recognized right away the ideal nature of Goethe's archetypal plant and declared that no reality could be consistent with such a plant. This stimulated Goethe to think about the relationship of what he called “ typus ” to empirical reality. He encountered a problem here that belongs to the most significant problems of all human investigation: the problem of the relationship between idea and reality, between thinking and experience. This became ever clearer to him: No one single empirical object corresponds entirely to his typus ; no entity of nature was identical to it. The content of the typus concept cannot therefore stem from the sense world as such, even though it is won in the encounter with the sense world. Its content must therefore lie within the typus itself; the idea of the archetypal entity could only be of a kind which, by virtue of a necessity lying within itself, develops a content out of itself that then in another form — in the form of a perception — manifests within the phenomenal world. it is interesting in this regard to see how Goethe himself, when meeting empirical natural scientists. stood up for the rights of experience and for keeping idea and object strictly separated. In 1786, Sömmerring sends him a book in which Sömmerring makes an attempt to discover the seat of the soul. In a letter that he sends to Sömmerring on August 28, 1796, Goethe finds that Sömmerring has woven too much metaphysics into his views; an idea about objects of experience has no justification if it goes beyond these, if it is not founded in the being of the object itself. With objects of experience, the idea is an organ for grasping, in its necessary interconnection, that which otherwise would be merely perceived in a blind juxtaposition and succession. But, from the fact that the idea is not allowed to bring anything new to the object, it follows that the object itself, in its own essential being, is something ideal and that empirical reality must have two sides: one, by which it is particular, individual, and the other by which it is ideal-general. Fortunate Event ( Glückliches Ereignis ) Power to Judge in Beholding ( Anschauende Urteilskraft ) Reflection and Devotion ( Bedenken und Ergebung ) Formative Impulse ( Bildungstrieb ) Apologies for the Undertaking ( Das Unternehmen wird entschuldigt ) The Purpose Introduced ( Die Absicht eingeleitet ) The Content Prefaced ( Der Inhalt bevorwortet ) History of My Botanical Studies ( Geschichte meines botanischen Studiums ) All these essays express the thought already indicated above, that every object has two sides: the direct one of its manifestation (form of manifestation), and the second one that contains its being . In this way, Goethe arrives at the only satisfactory view of nature, which establishes the one truly objective method. If a theory regards the ideas as something foreign to the object itself, as something merely subjective, then it cannot profess to be truly objective if it ever uses the idea at all. But Goethe can maintain that he adds nothing to the objects that does not already lie in the objects themselves. Goethe also pursued the detailed factual aspects of those branches of science to which his ideas were related. In 1795, he attended lectures by Loder on the ligaments; during this period, he did not at all lose sight of anatomy and physiology, which seems all the more important since it was precisely then that he was writing his lectures on osteology. In 1796 attempts were made to grow plants in darkness and under coloured glass. Later on, the metamorphosis of insects was also investigated. A further stimulus came from the philologist F.A. Wolff who drew Goethe's attention to his namesake Wolff who, in his Theoria Generationis , had already expressed ideas in 1759 that were similar to those of Goethe on the metamorphosis of the plants. Goethe was moved by this fact to concern himself more deeply with Wolff, which he did in 1807; he discovered later, however, that Wolff, with all his acuity, was not yet clear on precisely the main points. Wolff did not yet know the typus as something non-sense-perceptible, as something that develops its content merely out of inner necessity. He still regarded the plant as an external, mechanical complex of individual details. Goethe's exchanges with his many scientist friends, as well as the joy of having found recognition and imitation of his endeavors among many kindred spirits, led Goethe to the thought, in 1807, of publishing the fragments of his natural-scientific studies that he had held back until then. He gradually abandoned his intention of writing a more comprehensive natural-scientific work. But the individual essays did not yet reach publication in 1807. His interest in the colour theory pushed morphology into the background again for a time. The first booklet of these essays first appeared in 1817. By 1824, two volumes of these essays had appeared, the first in four booklets, the second in two. Besides the essays on Goethe's own views, we also find here discussions of significant literary publications in the realm of morphology, and also treatises of other scholars, whose presentations, however, are always complementary to Goethe's interpretation of nature. On yet two further occasions, Goethe was challenged to occupy himself more intensively with natural-scientific matters. Both of these involved significant literary publications — in the realm of science — that related most deeply to his own strivings. On the first occasion, the stimulus was given by the studies of the botanist Martius on the spiral tendency in plants, on the second occasion, by a natural-scientific dispute in the French Academy of Sciences. Martius saw plant form, in its development, as comprised of a spiral and a vertical tendency. The vertical tendency brings about growth in the direction of the root and stem; the spiral tendency brings about the spreading out of leaves, blossoms, etc. Goethe saw in this thought only an elaboration of ideas he had already set down in 1790 in his book on metamorphosis, but here focusing more on spatial elements (vertical, spiral). For proof of this assertion, we refer you to our comments on Goethe's essay, On the Spiral Tendency of Vegetation , 44 Über die Spiraltendenz der Vegetation from which the fact emerges that Goethe, in this essay, does not bring forward anything essentially new with respect to his earlier ideas. We want to direct this statement particularly to those who assert that there is evident here, in fact, a retrogression of Goethe from his earlier clear views back into the “deepest depths of mysticism.” Even at a most advanced age (1830-32), Goethe still wrote two essays on the dispute between the two French natural scientists, Cuvier and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. In these essays we find yet once more, in striking conciseness, a synthesis of the principles of Goethe's view of nature. Cuvier was altogether an empiricist of the old school of natural science. For each species of animal he sought a particular corresponding concept. He believed he had to take up into the conceptual edifice of his system of organic nature as many individual types as there are animal species present in nature. But for him the individual types stood there side by side without any mediation. What he did not take into consideration is this. Our need for knowledge is not satisfied with the particular as such in the way it approaches us directly as phenomenon. But since we approach an entity of the sense world with no other intention, in fact, than of knowing it, we should not assume that the reason we declare ourselves unsatisfied with the particular as such is to be found in the nature of our ability to know. On the contrary, the reason must lie within the object itself. The essential being of the particular itself, in fact, by no means consists only in this, its particularness; it presses, in order to be understood, toward a kind of being that is not particular, but rather, general ( ein Allgemeines ). This ideal-general is the actual being — the essence of every particular entity. Only one side of the existence of a particular entity lies in its particularness; the other side is the general — the typus (see Goethe's Aphorisms in Prose ). This is how it is to be understood when the particular is spoken of as a form of the general. Since the ideal-general is therefore the actual being, the content, of the particular, it is impossible for the ideal-general to be derived, abstracted, from the particular. Since it has nowhere from which to borrow its content, it must give this content to itself. The typical-general is therefore of such a nature that, in it, content and form are identical. But it can therefore also be grasped only as a whole, independent of what is individual. Science has the task with every particular entity of showing how, according to the entity's essential being, the entity subordinates itself to the ideal-general. Through this the particular kinds of existence enter the stage of mutually determining and depending upon each other. What otherwise can be perceived only as spatial-temporal juxtaposition and succession is now seen in necessary interconnection. But Cuvier wouldn't hear of any such view. This view, on the other hand, was the one held by Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire. This is actually the aspect that aroused Goethe's interest in this dispute. The matter has often been misrepresented because one saw the facts, through the glasses of most modern views, in a completely different light than that in which they appear if one approaches them without preconceptions. Geoffroy referred not only to his own research, but also to a number of German scientists of like mind, among whom Goethe is also named. Goethe's interest in this matter was extraordinary. He was extremely happy to find a colleague in Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire: “Now Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire is also definitely on our side and with him all his significant students and adherents in France This event is of inconceivably great value to me, and I am right to jubilate about the final victory of something to which I have dedicated my life and which is pre-eminently also my own,” he says to Eckermann on August 2, 1830. It is altogether a strange phenomenon that in Germany Goethe's research found a response only among philosophers and but little among natural scientists, whereas the response in France was more significant among the latter. De Candolle gave Goethe's theory of metamorphosis his closest attention and treated botany generally in a way that was not far from Goethean views. Also, Goethe's Metamorphosis had already been translated into French by F. de Gingins-Lassaraz. Under such conditions, Goethe could definitely hope that a translation of his botanical writings into French, carried out with his collaboration, would not fall on barren ground. Such a translation was then provided in 1831, with Goethe's continuous assistance, by Friedrich Jakob Soret. It contained that first Attempt of 1790, the history of Goethe's botanical studies, and the effect of his theories upon his contemporaries, as well as something about de Candolle, — in French, with German on the opposite page.

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA001/English/MP1988/GA001_c04.html

The Nature and Significance of Goethe's Writings on Organic Development

GA001_c05

September 1925

Goethean Science

Dornach

When, at the end of this consideration of Goethe's thoughts on metamorphosis, I look back over the views that I felt compelled to express, I cannot conceal from myself the fact that a very great number of outstanding adherents of the various tendencies in scientific thought are of a different view than I. Their position with respect to Goethe is completely clear to me; and the judgment they will pronounce on my attempt to present the standpoint of our great thinker and poet is quite predictable. The views about Goethe's strivings in the realm of natural science are separated into two opposing camps. The adherents of modern monism with Professor Haeckel at their head, recognize in Goethe the prophet of Darwinism who conceives of the organic completely in the Darwinian sense: as governed by the laws that are also at work in inorganic nature. The only thing Goethe lacked, they believe, was the theory of natural selection by which Darwin first founded the monistic world view and which raised the theory of evolution into a scientific conviction. Opposing this standpoint there stands another, which assumes that Goethe's idea of the typus is nothing more than a general concept, an idea in the sense of Platonic philosophy. According to this view, Goethe did indeed make individual statements that remind one of the theory of evolution at which he arrived through the pantheism inherent in his nature; however, he did not feel any need to go all the way to the ultimate mechanical foundations . Thus there can be no question of finding the theory of evolution in the modern sense in Goethe. As I was attempting to explain Goethe's views, without taking any definite standpoint beforehand , purely out of Goethe's nature, out of the whole of his spirit, it became clear to me that neither the one nor the other of these two camps — extraordinarily significant as their contributions have been toward an assessment of Goethe — has interpreted his view of nature altogether correctly. The first of the two views characterized above is entirely right in asserting that Goethe, in striving to explain organic nature, combats the dualism that assumes insuperable barriers to exist between organic nature and the inorganic world. But Goethe asserted the possibility of this explanation not because he conceived of the forms and phenomena of organic nature in a mechanistic context, but rather because he saw that the higher context in which they do stand is in no way closed to our knowledge. He did indeed conceive of the universe in a monistic way as an undivided unity — from which he by no means excluded the human being — but he also therefore recognized that within this unity levels are to be discerned that have their own laws. Already from his youth up, he reacted negatively to efforts to picture unity as uniformity , and to conceive of the organic world, as well as everything that appears as higher nature in nature, as being governed by the laws at work in the inorganic world (see History of my Botanical Studies ). It was also this rejection that later compelled him to assume the existence of a power to judge in beholding, by which we grasp organic nature, in contrast to the discursive intellect, by which we know inorganic nature. Goethe conceives of the world as a circle of circles, each of which has its own principle of explanation. Modern monists know only one single circle: that of inorganic natural laws. The second of the two opinions about Goethe described above recognizes that with him it is a matter of something different than with modern monism. But since the adherents of this second view consider it a postulate of science that organic nature is explained in the same way as inorganic nature, and since from the very start they reject with abhorrence a view like Goethe's, they regard it as altogether useless to go more deeply into his strivings. Thus Goethe's high principles could gain full validity in neither camp. And it is precisely these principles that are so outstanding in his work, which, for someone who has recognized them in all their depth, do not lose in significance even when he sees that many a detail of Goethean research needs to be corrected. This fact now requires of a person who is attempting to present Goethe's views that he direct his attention away from the critical assessment of each individual thing Goethe discovered in one or another chapter of natural science, and toward what is central to the Goethean view of nature. By seeking to meet this requirement, one comes close to possibly being misunderstood by precisely those by whom it would be most painful for me to be misunderstood: by the pure empiricists. I mean those who pursue in every direction the factually demonstrable relationships of organisms, the empirically given materials, and who regard the question as to the primal principles of the organic realm as one that is still open today. What I bring cannot be directed against them, because it does not touch on them. On the contrary: I build a part of my hopes precisely on them, because their hands are still free in every respect. They are also the ones who will still have to correct many an assertion of Goethe, for he did sometimes err in the factual realm; here, of course, even the genius cannot overcome the limitations of his time. In the realm of principles, however, he arrived at fundamental views that have the same significance for organic science that Galileo's basic laws have for mechanics. To establish this fact was the task I set myself. I hope that those whom my words cannot convince will at least see the good will with which I strove, without respect to persons, attentive only to the subject at hand, to solve the problem I have indicated — explaining Goethe's scientific writings out of the whole of his nature — and to express a conviction that for me is uplifting. Since one has made a fortunate and successful beginning at explaining Goethe's literary works in that way, there already lies in that the challenge to bring all the works of his spirit under this kind of study. This cannot remain unaccomplished forever, and I will not be the last among those who will heartily rejoice if my successor succeeds better than I. May youthful and striving thinkers and researchers — especially those who are not merely interested in breadth of vision, but who rather look directly at what is central to our knowing activity — grant my reflections some attention, and follow in great numbers to set forth more perfectly what I was striving to present.

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA001/English/MP1988/GA001_c05.html

Concluding Remarks on Goethe's Morphological Views

GA001_c06

September 1925

Goethean Science

Dornach

"In June 1794, Johann Gottlieb Fichte sent the first sections of his Theory of Science 45 Wissenscha(...TRUNCATED)

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA001/English/MP1988/GA001_c06.html

Goethe's Way of Knowledge

GA001_c07

September 1925

Goethean Science

Dornach

"In the editing of Goethe's natural-scientific writings, for which I was responsible, I was guided b(...TRUNCATED)

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA001/English/MP1988/GA001_c07.html

The Arrangement of Goethe's Natural-scientific Writings

GA001_c08

September 1925

Goethean Science

Dornach

"Someone who sets himself the task of presenting the spiritual development of a thinker has to expla(...TRUNCATED)

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA001/English/MP1988/GA001_c08.html

From Art to Science

GA001_c09

September 1925

Goethean Science

Dornach

"We have already indicated in the previous chapter that Goethe's scientific world view does not exis(...TRUNCATED)

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA001/English/MP1988/GA001_c09.html

Goethe's Epistemology

GA001_c10

September 1925

Goethean Science

Dornach

"We have established what the relationship is between the world of ideas — attained by scientific (...TRUNCATED)

https://rsarchive.org/Books/GA001/English/MP1988/GA001_c10.html

Knowing and Human Action in the Light of the Goethean Way of Thinking