476 HISTORY OF PHYSIOLOGY. 



far removed from any mere mechanical action, that 

 the leading idea in these speculations was first 

 strongly and effectively apprehended, not by a 

 laborious experimenter and reasoner, but by a man 

 of singularly brilliant and creative fancy ; not by a 

 mathematician or chemist, but by a poet. And we 

 may add further, that this poet had already shown 

 himself incapable of rightly apprehending the rela- 

 tion of physical facts to their principles ; and had, 

 in trying his powers on such subjects, exhibited 

 a signal instance of the ineffectual and perverse 

 operation of the method of philosophizing to which 

 the constitution of his mind led him. The person 

 of whom we speak, is John Wolfgang Gothe, who 

 is held, by the unanimous voice of Europe, to have 

 been one of the greatest poets of our own, or of 

 any time, and whose Doctrine of Colours we have 

 already had to describe, in the History of Optics, as 

 an entire failure. Yet his views on the laws which 

 connect the forms of plants into one simple system, 

 have been generally accepted and followed up. We 

 might almost be led to think that this writer's 

 poetical endowments had contributed to this scien- 

 tific discovery; the love of beauty of form, by 

 fixing the attention upon the symmetry of plants ; 

 and the creative habit of thought, by making con- 

 stant developement a familiar process 1 . 



1 We may quote some of the poet's own verses as an illus- 

 tration of his feelings on this subject. They are addressed to a 

 lady. 



