One observes also that an organism thus comes to life within one, even down to its most minute parts: that one conceives it, not as a lifeless, self-enclosed object, but as something evolving, becoming, as the continuously unresting within itself.

As we endeavor in what follows to set forth in detail all that has been hinted at, the relationship will become clear between Goethe's view of nature and that of our own age—especially the theory of evolution in its modern form.

II

In tracing historically the origin of Goethe's thought regarding the morphology of organisms, one may all too easily fall into doubt as to the part that is to be ascribed to the period of the poet's youth—that is, the time before he went to Weimar. Goethe himself attached little value to his scientific knowledge during that period. He said: “Of what really constitutes external nature I had no conception, and of her so-called three kingdoms not the least knowledge.” On the basis of this assertion, it is generally thought that the beginning of his scientific reflections occurred after he came to Weimar. Yet it seems advisable to go further back, if one is not to leave unexplained the whole spirit of his conceptions. The animating impulse which guided his studies in the direction we shall later explain is apparent even in his earliest youth.

When Goethe entered the University of Leipzig, the spirit still completely dominant there in all scientific endeavors was that which characterized a great part of the eighteenth century, which separated the totality of knowledge into two extremes that no one felt the need to unite. On one side was the philosophy of Christian Wolf (1679-1754), which moved wholly in an abstract realm; on the other side, the individual branches of the sciences, which were lost in the external describing of endless details, and wholly devoid of any effort to discover a higher principle in the realm to which the objects of their research belonged. That philosophy could not find its way out of the sphere of general concepts into the realm of immediate reality, of the individual existence. In it the most self-evident things were treated with utmost detailed thoroughness. One learned that the Thing is something which has no contradiction in itself; that there are finite and infinite substances; and so on. But if one brought these generalities to bear upon things themselves in order to understand their mode of action and their life, one was left quite helpless; it was impossible to apply these concepts to the world in which we live and which we wish to understand. The things around us, however, were described in a manner largely void of any principle, purely according to their appearance, their external characteristics. On the one hand, there was a system of knowledge dealing with principles which lacked a living substance, a loving absorption in the immediate reality; and, on the other, a system of knowledge void of principles, which lacked the substance of ideas. They confronted each other without any mediation, each fruitless for the other. Goethe's wholesome nature was repelled in equal manner by each of these one-sidednesses; and, in his opposition to them, there developed in him conceptions which later guided him to that fruitful view of nature in which idea and experience in complete reciprocal interpenetration mutually animate each other and combine to form a whole.

The concept, therefore, which exponents of those extremes could least of all grasp developed for Goethe as the very first: the concept of life. When we reflectively observe a living creature in its external manifestation, it exhibits a great number of details which appear as its members or organs. The description of these members, as to their shapes, relative positions, sizes, etc., might constitute the content of an extensive treatise, to which the second of the two schools of thought we have described devoted itself. But the mechanical construction of any inorganic body could also be described in the same way. It was altogether forgotten that, in the case of the organism, one must keep clearly in mind most of all the fact that here the external manifestation is determined by an inner principle; that in every organ the totality is active. That external phenomenon, the spatial juxtaposition of the members, can be observed also after the destruction of the life; it continues still for a certain time. But what confronts us in a dead organism is, in reality, no longer an organism. That principle has disappeared which permeated all the individual parts. Against that way of observing which destroys life in order to know life, Goethe opposed very early the possibility and the necessity for a higher way of observing. We see this even in a letter of the Strassburg time, of July 14, 1770, in which he says of a butterfly: “The poor creature trembles in the net, rubs off its most beautiful colors; and, if one catches it intact, yet it sticks there at last stark and lifeless; the corpse is not the whole creature; something else belongs to it—another principal part, and in this instance as in all others a primary principal part: the life. . .” The same view gives rise also to the following lines in Faust:

Who wishes the living to know and describe

Seeks first the spirit thence to drive;

Then all the parts he has in his hand—

Lacks only, alas! the spiritual band.

With this denial of a certain view Goethe did not content himself, but—as was to be assumed from his nature—he sought more and more to develop his own view; and we recognize very often in the indications available to us of his thinking from 1769 to 1775 the germinal ideas for his later works. He was developing the idea of an entity in which every part animates every other, in which one principle permeates all the details. We read in Faust:

How all a single whole doth weave,

One in the other works and lives.

And we read in Satyros:

In Nothingness that Primordial gushed;

Light's mighty voice through the darkness rushed,

To every being's depth brought fire,

Waking to life the germs of desire;

The elements opened to one another,

Hungering each of them for the other,

All-permeating, all-permeated.

This entity is conceived as being subject to continuous changes in time, but in all the stages of these changes only one being is constantly manifest, asserting itself as that which endures, that which is stable amid change. We read further in Satyros in regard to this primordial thing (Urding):

And up and down did rolling swing

The all and one eternal Thing,

Changing ever, the same forever.

One should compare with this what Goethe wrote in 1807 as the introduction to his theory of metamorphosis: “If, however, we observe all forms, especially the organic forms, we find nowhere something continuing, nowhere something at rest, concluded, but, on the contrary, that all is in continuous fluctuating movement.” With this fluctuating element he contrasts there the Idea—or “something held fast in experience only for the moment”—as that which is constant. It will be recognized clearly enough from the passage quoted above from Satyros that the foundation for Goethe's morphological ideas had already been laid before he came to Weimar.

But what must be held firmly in mind is that this idea of a living entity is not applied at once to an individual organism, but that the entire universe is conceived as such a living being. The initial incitement in this case is certainly to be found in the alchemistic work with Fraulein von Klettenberg and in the reading of Theophrastus Paraceleus after Goethe's return from Leipzig (1768-69.) The endeavor was made through some sort of experiment to lay hold upon the Principle permeating the entire universe, to exhibit it in a substance. Yet, this way of reflecting about the world, bordering upon the mystical, constituted only a transitory episode in Goethe's development and yielded very soon to a more wholesome and objective manner of thinking. The view of the entire universe as a great organism, as we find this indicated in the passages cited from Faust and Satyros, was still maintained, however, approximately until 1780, as we shall later see from the essay on Nature. It appears still once more in Faust, in the passage where the Spirit of the Earth is represented as that Life Principle interpenetrating the All-Organism:

In tides of life, in storms of action,

Up and down I wave,

Weave I hither and yon,

Birth and the grave,

A sea without bound,

A changeful weaving,

A radiant living.

While definite views were thus developing in Goethe's mind, there came into his hand in Strassburg a book which sought to establish a world view precisely opposite to his own.