120 THE DOCTRINE OF DESCENT. 



like a dolphin or a cachelot ; this was because he started 

 from an archetype or fundamental form, Goethe was 

 only more consistent, and notwithstanding the " painful 

 consequences," insisted on the inter-maxillary bone in 

 man as in the ape. 



Goethe says in 1807 : " If plants and animals be con- 

 templated in their most imperfect condition, it is scarcely 

 possible to distinguish them. This much, however, we 

 may say, that from a kindred so close as scarcely to be 

 discriminated, emerge creatures which, as plants and 

 animals, are perfected in two different directions, so that 

 the plant finally attains its glory in the tree, durable 

 and rigid ; the animal in man, in extreme mobility 

 and freedom." But this is nothing more than the re- 

 petition, symbolically embellished, in Goethe's "method 

 of investigating, knowing, and enjoying," of a proposi- 

 tion already propounded by Buffon fifty years before, 

 and subsequently varied in many ways. 



Nor is it Goethe who, in his Sketch of 1796, first urges 

 the very suggestive comparison of identical organs in 

 the same body ; this was already done by Vicq d'Azyr 

 in 1786. In a word, the conception of type, arche- 

 type, ground-plan (dessein primitif), was an acquisition 

 of that age, which was merely expressed by Goethe in 

 a more pregnant and many-sided manner, and which 

 appears the more alluring as he combined with it the 

 idea of motion and mobility, but, owing to his excessive 

 craving for symbols, he did this in a figurative sense. 



When Goethe imagines that he has discovered " laws," 

 he labours under the same delusion as that in which 

 naturalists have rocked themselves from the last century 

 down to the most recent times, when they accept a mere 



