{20 - 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 propost- 
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 
