I,20 THE DOCTRINE OF DESCENT. 



more consistent, and notwithstanding the " painful conse- 

 quences," 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 ani- 

 mals, 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 free- 

 dom." But this is nothing more than the repetition, sym- 

 bolically embellished, in Goethe's " method of investi- 

 gating, knowing, and enjoying,'' of a proposition already 

 propounded by Bufion fifty years before, and subse- 

 quently 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, archetype, 

 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 mobilit)^ but, owing to his excessive craving for sym- 

 bols, 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 

 corroboration of facts for an explanation of those facts, 

 for their reduction to their causes. He is acquainted with 



