CHAPTER IV 



i 



GOETHE 



SCIENCE, in so far as it rises above the mere accumulation 

 of facts, is a product of the mind's creative activity. 

 Scientific theories are not so much formulae extracted 

 from experience as intuitions imposed upon experience. 

 So it was that Goethe, who was little more than 

 a dilettante, 1 seized upon the essential principles of a 

 morphology some years before that morphology was accepted 

 by the workers. 



Goethe is important in the history of morphological 

 method because he was the first to bring to clear conscious- 

 ness and to express in definite terms the idea on which 

 comparative anatomy before him was based, the idea of the 

 unity of plan. We have seen that this idea was familiar to 

 Aristotle and that it was recognised implicitly by all who 

 after him studied structure comparatively. In Goethe's time 

 the idea had become ripe for expression. It was used as a 

 guiding principle in Goethe's youth particularly by Vicq 

 d'Azyr and by Camper. The former (1748-1794), who 

 discovered 2 in the same year as Goethe (1784) the inter- 

 maxillary bone in man, pointed out the homology in 

 structure between the fore limb and the hind limb, and 

 interpreted certain rudimentary bones, the intermaxillaries 

 and rudimentary clavicles, in the light of the theory that 

 Vertebrates are built upon one single plan of structure. 



" Nature seems to operate always according to an original 

 and general plan, from which she departs with regret and 



1 See Kohlbrugge, "Hist. krit. Studien iiber Goethe als Natur- 

 forscher," Zool. Annalen. v., 1913, pp. 83-231. 

 - Or re-discovered, according to Kohlbrugge. 



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