This was Holbach's Systeme de la nature. If he had until then to complain only that the living entity was described like a mechanical heap of individual things, he became acquainted in Holbach with a philosopher who actually looked upon the living creature as a mechanism. What was due in the other cases only to a lack of capacity for recognizing life down to its roots led in this instance to a dogma which inflicted death upon life. In Dichtung und Wahrheit*, Book II, Goethe says in regard to this: “Matter was assumed to have existed from eternity, to have been in motion from eternity, and to have brought forth with this motion, right and left in all directions, the endless phenomena of existence. With all this, we should have been contented if the author had actually built the world up before our eyes out of this matter in motion, but he was able to know just as little about nature as we; and, while he hammered in some generalizations, he abandoned these immediately in order to transform that which is higher than nature, or which appears as a higher nature within nature, into a heavy, material nature—in motion, indeed, yet without direction or form—and believed that he had thus achieved a good deal.” In all of this Goethe could find nothing except “matter in motion,” and in opposition to this his own concepts of nature took ever clearer form. We find these brought together and presented in the essay Nature, which was written about 1780. Since all of Goethe's ideas about nature which we have thus far found only scatteringly indicated are gathered together in this essay, it gains a special significance. The idea here confronts us of a Being which is in a state of constant change and yet ever remains the same: “All is new and always the old.” “She [nature] is forever changing and in her there is nothing standing still a single moment,” but “her laws are unchangeable.” We shall see later that Goethe sought in the endless multitude of plant forms for the one archetypal plant (Urpflanze). Even this idea we find here already indicated: “Each of her [nature's] works has an essential nature of its own, each of her manifestations a most isolated concept; and yet all comprises only one.” Indeed, the position which he later took in reference to exceptional cases—that is, not to consider them simply as defective formations, but to explain them on the basis of natural laws—is here quite clearly affirmed: “Even the most unnatural is nature,” and “her exceptions are rare.”

We have seen that, even before Goethe went to Weimar, he had already developed a definite concept of an organism. For, even though the essay Nature belongs to a much later period, it contains for the most part earlier views of Goethe. He had not yet applied this concept to a definite genus of natural objects, to individual creatures. For this purpose he required the concrete world of living entities in immediate actuality. The reflection of nature which had passed through the human mind was never the element which could stimulate Goethe. The conversations on botany in the company of Hofrat Ludwig in Leipzig were without any deeper influence than the table conversations with medical friends in Strassburg. As regards scientific studies, the young Goethe appears to us like Faust deprived of the freshness of the direct beholding of nature, as Faust expresses his longing for this in the words:

Oh, could I to the mountain height

Ascend in thy most blissful light,

With spirits hover by mountain caves,

On meadows wander thy twilight laves.

It seems like a fulfillment of this longing when, upon his arrival in Weimar, he was permitted “to exchange the air of a room in the city for the atmosphere of the country, the forest, and the garden.”

We must consider as a direct incentive to the study of plants the poet's engrossment with the planting of the garden given to him by the Archduke Karl August. The acceptance of the garden by Goethe took place on April 21, 1776, and his diary, edited by Keil, informs us frequently from this time on about his work in this garden, one of his favorite occupations. An added area of activity in this direction was afforded him by the Thuringian forest, where he had the opportunity to acquaint himself also with the life phenomena of the lower organisms. He was especially interested in the mosses and lichens. On October 31, 1777, he requested of Frau von Stein mosses of all sorts, damp and with roots whenever possible in order that they might be propagated. It must needs appear to us highly significant that Goethe was occupying himself here already with these organisms of a very low order, and yet traced the laws of plant organization later from the higher plants. This circumstance should not be attributed, as is done by many, to an underestimating of the significance of the less highly evolved entities but to a clearly conscious purpose.

From this time on the poet never abandons the world of the plants. He was probably occupied very early with Linne's* writings. We learn first of his acquaintance with these from letters to Frau von Stein of the year 1782.

Linne's efforts tended in the direction of bringing into the knowledge of plants a systematic lucidity. A certain system was to be discovered in which each organism would occupy its specific place, so that it could easily be located at any time—indeed, that there might be a means of orientation in the endless multiplicity of single entities. To this end, the living entities would have to be studied with respect to the degrees of their kinship, and put together into groups corresponding to these grades of kinship. Since the most important thing of all in this undertaking was to know every plant and to find readily its place in the system, it was necessary to pay special attention to those characteristics which differentiate the plants from one another. In order to render impossible the confusion of one plant with another, special search was made for these differentiating marks. In this regard, Linne and his students considered as characteristic such external differences as size, number, and position of individual organs. In this way the plants were, indeed, arranged in a series, but just as a number of inorganic objects could have been arranged—according to differentiations which were based upon the external appearances, not the inner nature, of the plants. They appeared in an external juxtapositon, without inner necessary connection. Because of the significant concept which Goethe held of a living entity, this manner of reflection could not satisfy him.