Problems, Concepts and Their History 



that its domination is not yet now com- 

 pletely outworn? It was certainly at least in 

 part the clear and inevitable reaction against 

 Cartesianism and against the instillation of 

 the analytical order and system of seven- 

 teenth century mechanics into the study of 

 animate nature. Goethe, one of its warmest 

 partisans, has spoken specifically to this 

 point in his Geschichte meines botanischen 

 Studiums (Gedanken und Aufsdtze, 1944 

 edition, XII, 314): 



Vorlaufig . . . will ich bekennen, dass nach Shake- 

 speare und Spinoza auf mich die grosste Wirkung 

 von Linne ausgegangen, und zwar gerade durch 

 den Widerstreit, zu welchem er mich aufforderte. 

 Denn indem ich sein scharfes, geistreiches Abson- 

 dern, seine treffenden, zweckmassigen, oft aber 

 willkiirlichen Gesetze in mich aufzunehmen ver- 

 suchte, ging in meinem Innem ein Zwiespalt vor: 

 Das, was er mit Gewalt auseinanderzuhalten suchte, 

 musste, nach dem innersten Bediirfnis meines Wes- 

 ens, zur Vereinigung anstreben. 



Goethe is as good an example as any with 

 whom to continue the discussion, not only 

 because he originated the concept of mor- 

 phology in our modern and dynamic sense, 

 but also especially because he was so vividly 

 articulate in describing what went on in his 

 own mind during the process of it. His own 

 studies on the metamorphosis of plants and 

 on the vertebral constitution of the skull, 

 emphasizing the unity of type, and what he 

 thought was his discovery of the intermaxil- 

 lary bone in the human fetus, suggesting 

 that the uniformity of anatomical plan is 

 based on the existence of a developmental 

 archetype, typify the new Naturphilosophie. 

 Natural phenomena represent modifications 

 of an Idea in the Mind of the Creator: here 

 is a new Idealism, less important in that it 

 revivified Plato than that it again lost sight 

 of Aristotle, with as disastrous delaying con- 

 sequences as in the Middle Ages: Agassiz, 

 as late as 1857, could still answer with an 

 unequivocal affirmative his self-addressed 

 question as to whether the taxonomic divi- 

 sions of the animal kingdom have "been in- 

 stituted by the Divine Intelligence as the 

 categories of his mode of thinking" (1857, 

 p. 8). 



This must inevitably appeal, with all of 

 its implications of beauty in nature, to 

 Goethe the poet, who is said to have soothed 

 himself to sleep visualizing a seed growing 

 into a plant. Its mysticism, quite in the neo- 

 Platonic tradition, should have been oppro- 

 brious to the scientist; but this was the mo- 

 ment in history when the scientist turned 

 romantic, to his own loss. The Middle Ages, 



for all the weaknesses of scholasticism, 

 maintained the firm conviction that the Uni- 

 verse was capable of being understood by 

 human reason; and, as Whitehead ('25) re- 

 minds us, it is to medieval scholasticism that 

 we are indebted for our habits of exact 

 thought. The Naturphilosophen, at their 

 most emotional extremes, grew away from 

 reason in its best sense, and their thought 

 was hardly precise in the sense of modern 

 science. Whitehead stresses too the high 

 standard of objectivity set by the ancient and 

 medieval worlds, with its obvious advantage 

 for science. Its loss was part of the price paid 

 for the developing individviality emerging 

 from the philosophy of the late eighteenth 

 and early nineteenth centuries, and this was 

 a debt whose payment nearly bankrupted 

 the intellectual economy of the Naturphi- 

 losophen. 



The movement had its philosophical sxvp- 

 port from Kant, who, like Leibniz before 

 him, laid emphasis on the metaphysical, and 

 who put a premium on transcendentalism; 

 Kant's categories, after all, were given in 

 advance of experience and the Ding-an-sich 

 was beyond it. Goethe, however, was inde- 

 pendent of Kant. "Meine 'Metamorphose der 

 Pflanzen,' " he told Eckermann, "habe ich 

 geschrieben, ehe ich etwas von Kant wusste, 

 und doch ist sie ganz im Sinne seiner Lehre" 

 (Eckermann, 1905 edition, I, 310). It might 

 have been better if he, and the other Natur- 

 philosophen., had known Kant better. Kant, 

 as Radl ('30, p. 369) has pointed out, "had 

 declared that the Absolute is never known 

 and can never be known; yet his followers," 

 to continue with Radl, " — the Romantic 

 Philosophers — made this Absolute the basis 

 of their philosophy, the only real thing left 

 in the Universe." 



For biology, it was this confusion between 

 the Idea and its representation in the or- 

 ganism, the Absolute and the knowable, that 

 was dangerous. Goethe typifies this, too. He 

 could coolly dictate the rules for observing 

 scientific objectivity (Gedanken und Auf- 

 satze, 1944 edition, XII, 93): 



Jeder Forscher muss sich durchaus ansehen als 

 einer, der zu einer Jury berufen ist. Er hat nur 

 darauf zu achten, inwiefem der Vortrag vollstandig 

 sei und durch klare Belege auseinandergesetzt. Er 

 fasst hiernach seine Ueberzeugung zusammen und 

 gibt seine Stimme, es sei nun, dass seine Meinung 

 mit der des Referenten iibereintreffe oder nicht. 



"Sobald man in der Wissenschaft einer 

 gewissen beschrankten Konfession angehort," 

 he said to Eckermann, "ist sogleich jede un- 

 befangene treue Auffassung dahin. . . . Es 



