246 SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT. 



imitations of eternal ideas in the sense of Plato, and 

 which confounds these abstractions of the mind with 

 the objective nature of real things." l Nevertheless, we 

 must recognise that through the vague and poetical ex- 

 positions of Goethe's writings there is to be seen the 

 fruitful idea of the change, the instability, of forms, as 

 an equally important side of reality. 2 In fact, Goethe 

 oscillates in his half-formed theories between the ideal 

 archetypes of Plato and the more recent conceptions of 

 Darwin and Spencer, as is proved t>y the vivid, even 

 passionate, interest which he took in the celebrated 

 controversy of Cuvier and Saint-Hilaire in the French 

 Academy of Sciences in the year 1830, an incident 

 which carries us into the midst of the ideas with which 

 the following chapter will be occupied. 



Before we take up those entirely different lines of 

 observation and reasoning, we must note a great ex- 

 pansion and development of the study of the form of 

 natural objects of morphology in two independent 

 directions. One of these carried the study of forms 

 into the larger dimensions of time and space, the past 



1 Sachs, ' Geschichte der Botanik,' 

 p. 181. 



2 Of Goethe Huxley says ('Life 

 of Owen,' vol. ii. p. 290) : " On 

 the face of the matter it is not 

 obvious that the brilliant poet had 

 less chance of doing good service 

 in natural science than the dullest 

 of dissectors and nomenclators. 

 Indeed there was considerable 

 reason, a hundred years ago, for 

 thinking that an infusion of the 

 artistic way of looking at things 

 might tend to revivify the some- 

 what mummified body of technical 

 zoology and botany. Great ideas 

 were floating about ; the artistic 



apprehension was needed to give 

 these airy nothings a local habit- 

 ation and a name ; to convert 

 vague suppositions into definite 

 hypotheses. And I apprehend that 

 it was just this service which 

 Goethe rendered by writing his 

 essays on the intermaxillary bone, 

 on osteology generally, and on the 

 metamorphosis of plants." A very 

 full appreciation of Goethe's merit 

 will be found in all the principal 

 writings of Ernst Haeckel, notably 

 in the fourth chapter of the first 

 volume of the ' Natiirliche Schop- 

 fungsgeschichte,' 9th ed., Berlin, 

 1898. 



