300 LEISURE-TIME STUDIES. 



powerful effect in suggesting that the order of Nature, both 

 in its living and non-living aspects, might be different from 

 the old ideas founded on the stability and unalterable 

 nature of the universe, ideas these, which, like many other 

 thoughts even of modern kind, had come to be regarded 

 with respect from the fact of their venerable age, if from no 

 other or more satisfactory cause. From Goethe himself, as 

 from a master mind, came abundant suggestions tending to 

 enforce the opinion that living beings were to a large extent 

 amenable to outward causes, and influenced by external 

 agencies. In his " Metamorphosis of Animals," the poet- 

 philosopher, with that imaginative force so characteristic of 

 his whole nature, thus enunciates the opinion that the outer 

 world, the animal constitution and the manner of its life, 

 together influence in a most decided fashion the whole 

 existence of the living being : 



"All members develop themselves according to eternal laws, 

 And the rarest form mysteriously preserves the primitive type. 

 Form, therefore, determines the animal's way of life, 

 And in turn the way of life powerfully reacts upon all form. 

 Thus the orderly growth of form is seen to hold, 

 Whilst yielding to change from externally acting causes. " 



Elsewhere, Goethe says of this subject, that while " an 

 inner original community forms the foundation of all organi- 

 sation, the variety of forms, on the other hand, arises from 

 the necessary relations to the outer world; and we may 

 therefore justly assume an original difference of conditions, 

 together with an uninterruptedly progressive transformation, 

 in order to be able to comprehend the constancy as well as 

 the variations of the phenomena of form." 



Thus are clearly expressed Goethe's views that the living 

 form was a mobile quantity, influenced and altered to a 

 greater or less degree by outward causes, acting in concert 

 with the internal life-forces and inherited constitution of the 

 being. In other words, with regard to the form of animals, 

 and to borrow Shakspeare's phrase, we might say 



" In them Nature's copy's not eterne." 



