Fehlt leider! nur das geistige Band."[83]
Goethe kept clear of this mistake; he knew that the artist comes nearer to the truth than the analyst.
In the fragment entitled Bildung und Umbildung organischer Naturen (1807), introductory to a reprint of his paper on the "Metamorphosis of Plants," we get an exposition of his general views on living things. He points out there how we try to understand things by separating them into their parts. We can, it is true, resolve the organism into its structural elements, but we cannot recompose it or endow it with life by joining up the parts. Hence we require some other means of understanding it. "In all ages even among scientific men there can be discerned a yearning to apprehend the living form as such, to grasp the connection of their external visible parts, to interpret them as indications of the inner activity, and so, in a certain measure, to master the whole conceptually." This science which should discover the inner meaning of organic Bildung is called Morphology.[84] In Morphology we should not speak of Gestalt or fixed form, or if we do we should understand by it only a momentary phase of Bildung. Form is of interest not in itself but only as the manifestation of the inner activity of the living being. Over development, he says elsewhere, there presides a formative force, a bildende Kraft or Bildungstrieb, which works out the idea of the organism. Living things, in his view of them, strive to manifest an idea. They are Nature's works of art—and so, incidentally, they require an artist to interpret them.
This profound conception of the nature of life is applied not only to the growing changing individual but also to the whole changing world of organisms. They are all manifestations of a living shaping power which moulds them. This shaping power, immanent in all life, is conceived to work according to a general plan, and so we get an explanation of the fact that living things seem simply varieties of one common type.
"If we once recognise," says Goethe, "that the creative spirit brings into being and shapes the evolution of the more perfect organic creatures according to a general scheme, is it altogether impossible to represent this original plan if not to the senses at least to the mind...?"[85]
Such an interpretation of the unity of plan reaches perhaps beyond the bounds of science.
[70] See Kohlbrugge, "Hist. krit. Studien über Goethe als Naturforscher," Zool. Annalen. v., 1913, pp. 83-231.
[71] Or re-discovered, according to Kohlbrugge.
[72] Cotta ed., vol. ix., p. 448.
[73] "First Draft of a General Introduction to Comparative Anatomy."