Kant's deed is significant in that it correctly drew attention to that polar division in human nature which, after all, was already established in Kant's own time. Kant demonstrated also that to win insight into the ethical nature of man with the aid of the isolated intellect alone implied a trespass beyond permissible limits. In order to give the doing part of the human being its necessary anchorage, however, Kant assigned it to a moral world-order entirely external to man, to which it could be properly related only through obedient submission.
In this way Kant became the philosopher of that division between knowledge and faith which to this day is upheld in both the ecclesiastical and scientific spheres of our civilization. Nevertheless, he did not succeed in safeguarding humanity from the consequences of Hume's philosophy; for man cannot live indefinitely in the belief that with the two parts of his own being he is bound up with two mutually unrelated worlds. The time when this was feasible is already over, as may be seen from the fact that ever greater masses of men wish to determine their behaviour according to their own ideas, and as they see no alternative in the civilization around them but to form ideas by means of the discursive reason which inevitably leads to agnosticism, they determine their actions accordingly. Meanwhile, the ethical life as viewed by Kant accordingly shrinks ever further into a powerless, hole-and-corner existence.
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It is Goethe's merit to have first shown that there is a way out of this impasse. He had no need to argue theoretically with Kant as to the justification of denying man any power of understanding apart from the discursive, and of leaving the faculty of intuitive knowledge to a divinity somewhere outside the world of man. For Goethe was his own witness that Kant was mistaken in regarding man's present condition as his lasting nature. Let us hear how he expresses himself on this fact at the beginning of his essay written as an answer to Kant's statement:
'It is true, the author here seems to be pointing to an intellect not human but divine. And yet, if in the moral sphere we are supposed to lift ourselves up to a higher region through faith in God, Virtue and Immortality, so drawing nearer to the Primal Being, why should it not be likewise in the intellectual? By contemplation (Anschauen) of an ever-creative nature, may we not make ourselves worthy to be spiritual sharers in her productions? I at first, led by an inner urge that would not rest, had quite unconsciously been seeking for the realm of Type and Archetype, and my attempt had been rewarded: I had been able to build up a description, in conformity with Nature herself. Now therefore nothing more could hinder me from braving what the Old Man of the King's Hill2 himself calls the Adventure of Reason.'
Goethe started from the conviction that our senses as well as our intellect are gifts of nature, and that, if at any given moment they prove incapable through their collaboration of solving a riddle of nature, we must ask her to help us to develop this collaboration adequately. Thus there was no question for him of any restriction of sense-perception in order to bring the latter in line with the existing power of the intellect, but rather to learn to make an ever fuller use of the senses and to bring our intellect into line with what they tell. 'The senses do not deceive, but the judgment deceives', is one of his basic utterances concerning their respective roles in our quest for knowledge and understanding. As to the senses themselves, he was sure that 'the human being is adequately equipped for all true earthly requirements if he trusts his senses, and so develops them as to make them worthy of trust'.
There is no contradiction in the statement that we have to trust our senses, and that we have to develop them to make them trustworthy. For, 'nature speaks upwards to the known senses of man, downwards to unknown senses of his'. Goethe's path was aimed at wakening faculties, both perceptual and conceptual, which lay dormant in himself. His experience showed him that 'every process in nature, rightly observed, wakens in us a new organ of cognition'. Right observation, in this respect, consisted in a form of contemplating nature which he called a 're-creating (creating in the wake) of an ever-creative nature' (Nachschaffen einer immer schaffenden Natur).
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We should do Goethe an injustice if we measured the value of his scientific work by the amount of factual knowledge he contributed to one or other sphere of research. Although Goethe did bring many new things to light, as has been duly recognized in the scientific fields concerned, it cannot be gainsaid that other scientists in his own day, working along the usual lines, far exceeded his total of discoveries. Nor can it be denied that, as critics have pointed out, he occasionally went astray in reporting his observations. These things, however, do not determine the value or otherwise of his scientific labours. His work draws its significance not so much from the 'what', to use a Goethean expression, as from the 'how' of his observations, that is, from his way of investigating nature. Having once developed this method in the field of plant observation, Goethe was able, with its aid, to establish a new view of animal nature, to lay the basis for a new meteorology, and, by creating his theory of light and colour, to provide a model for a research in the field of physics, free from onlooker-restrictions.
In the scientific work of Goethe his botanical studies have a special place. As a living organism, the plant is involved in an endless process of becoming. It shares this characteristic, of course, with the higher creatures of nature, and yet between it and them there is an essential difference. Whereas in animal and man a considerable part of the life-processes conceal themselves within the organism, in order to provide a basis for inner soul processes, the plant brings its inner life into direct and total outer manifestation. Hence the plant, better than anything, could become Goethe's first teacher in his exercise of re-creating nature.