318 M. Pictet on the Writings of Goethe 



and variations, naturally constitute the type, which accord- 

 ingly cannot be confounded with any species more than the 

 whole can be confounded with a part. 



It may be conceived how much such a method is preferable 

 to that; so frequently employed, of taking man as a type, when 

 his very perfection makes him, in most cases, very unfit for 

 this purpose. 



The creation of the type necessarily varies according to the 

 objects of comparison. If we wish to study a particular 

 class, the type may be more defined, the characters in common 

 being more numerous. The type the most difficult to esta- 

 blish will be the animal type, for to seize it perfectly, it will be 

 necessary to have a perfect idea of the parts common to all 

 animals, or in other words, to have exhausted the study of 

 analogies. Thus the establishment of types will be a feeling 

 our w r ay, and the perfect type the result of the science at its 

 zenith, as the imperfect type will be the amount of this sci- 

 ence at some certain period, and the basis upon which it will 

 lean in order to continue its progress. 



The type being once created, Goethe applies himself to its 

 comparison with individual forms, and, in this analysis, sets out 

 from the principle that diversity has no other origin than this ; 

 that, in the development, one part becomes predominant at the 

 expense of some other, and vice versa. He admits with respect 

 hereto the influence of surrounding media and of exterior causes 

 generally, by the force of which the nutritive matter is directed 

 in superabundance and under certain forms to particular parts, 

 so as to produce there a hypertrophy, always followed by an 

 atrophy in some other part of the same being, because the 

 nutritive matter is diverted from it to the gain of the former. 

 He supposes that a certain formative or plastic force is given 

 to every being, and that if it be directed to one point the con- 

 sequence must necessarily be inverse modifications with re- 

 gard to the others *. " The general total/' says he, " in the 



* To make this idea intelligible to those who are little accustomed to 

 these theories, I shall cite the instance of the reptiles, in which we see the 

 plastic force sometimes direct itself upon the vertebra?, sometimes upon the 

 feet. Starting from the lizard, as a mean point, we come on one side to the 

 frog, in which the feet, by an excessive development, subject the ribs to 

 atrophy ; and on the other side we find the serpent, in which the develop- 



