OF PLANTS. 83 



had only attained in a certain degree in the individual 

 plants. This conception is certainly by no means faultless. 

 In the first place, it is scarcely necessary to say to any one 

 who is accustomed to refined speculations, that in reference 

 to all these things, human strivings after the archetypes of 

 Nature are mere unsubstantial play of the imagination, 

 which at best can but help a tottering brain to bring the 

 conditions nearer to its power of comprehending them ; but 

 this always at the cost of the only true comprehension 

 itself. The setting up of a design, the carrying out, the 

 commission of errors therein, and consequent only partial 

 success of the whole, are conditions which belong only 

 to the imperfect reason of human beings, " whose know- 

 ledge is patchwork" This so-called Anthropopathy 

 (humanization), however, is without meaning in the pre- 

 sence of Nature ; for this is, according to the stand-point 

 which the human judgment takes, either the product of blind 

 force acting under unvarying laws and then to speak of 

 plan and a greater or less degree of perfection is absurd, since 

 all is rigid necessity, or, it appears to us as the Creation 

 of a Holy Author, and then plan and execution are equally 

 perfect and complete in the least as in the greatest, but for 

 the son of earth everywhere mysterious and inconceivable. 

 On the other hand, also, Gothe's idea of a typical plant 

 suffers from obscurity, since it is not clear how a man can 

 imagine such a type. This much is certain, that the 

 disagreeable, tasteless heaping up of a number of indi- 

 vidually possible forms into such an actual vegetable 

 monster as Turpin has perpetrated in his Atlas to Gothe's 

 scientific works, is anything but what Gothe pictured to 

 himself in his ideal plant. In order to impress the idea 

 upon the senses, we, also, must make use of a representation 

 of an ideal plant, which shall give us the highest develop- 



