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." ] 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 by 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 



apprehension was needed to give 

 these airy nothings a local habit- 

 ation and a name ; to convert 

 vague suppositions into definite 



the face of the matter it is not i hypotheses. And I apprehend that 



obvious that the brilliant poet had it was just this service which 



less chance of doing good service i Goethe rendered by writing his 



in natural science than the dullest essays on the intermaxillary bone, 



of dissectors and nomenclators. on osteology generally, and on the 



Indeed there was considerable metamorphosis of plants." A very 



reason, a hundred years ago, for full appreciation of Goethe's merit 



thinking that an infusion of the will be found in all the principal 



artistic way of looking at things writings of Ernst Haeckel, notably 



might tend to revivify the some- in the fourth chapter of the first 



what mummified body of technical volume of the ' Natiirliche Schop- 



zoology and botany. Great ideas j fungsgeschichte,' 9th ed., Berlin, 



were floating about ; the artistic I 1898. 



