REPETITION OF PARTS 49 



Idee, der Anlage nach," are the same, but in appearance may 

 be the same or similar, different or unlike. 1 Not only is 

 there a primordial animal and a primordial plant, schematic 

 forms to which all separate species are referable, but the 

 parts of each are themselves units, which " der Idee nach," 

 are identical inter se. This fantasy can hardly be taken 

 seriously as a scientific theory ; it seems, however, to have 

 been what guided Goethe in his " discovery " of the vertebral 

 nature of the skull. Just as the fore limb can be homologised 

 with the hind limb, so, reasoning by analogy, the skull should 

 be capable of being homologised with the vertebrae. To 

 what ludicrous extremes this doctrine of the repetition of 

 parts within the organism was pushed we shall see when we 

 consider the theories of the German transcendentalists of 

 the early nineteenth century. 



Though Goethe's morphological views were lacking in 

 definiteness he hit upon one or two ideas which proved useful. 

 Thus he enunciated the " law of balance " long before Etienne 

 Geoffrey St Hilaire, the law " that to no part can anything 

 be added, without something being taken away from another 

 part, and vice versa" He saw, too, what a help to the 

 interpretation of adult structure the study of the embryo 

 would be, for many bones which are fused in the adult are 

 separate in the embryo. 3 This also was a point to which 

 the later transcendentalists gave considerable attention. 



So far we have spoken of Goethe as if he were merely 

 the prophet of formal morphology ; we have pointed out 

 how he brought to clear expression the morphological 

 principle implicit in the idea of unity of type, and how he 

 seized upon some important guiding ideas, such as the 

 principle of connections. But Goethe was not a formalist, 

 and he was very far from the static conception of life which 

 is at the base of pure morphology. His interest was not in 

 Gestalt or fixed form, but in Bildung or form change. He 

 saw that Gestalt was but a momentary phase of Bildung, and 

 could be considered apart and in itself only by an abstraction 

 fatal to all understanding of the living thing. Mephistopheles 



1 Bildung und Umbildnng organischcr Naturen, 1807. 



2 Cotta ed., ix., p. 466, :) Loc. ct/., pp. 474-5. 



