In the spring of 1785 he writes to a friend in a way that shows him fully aware of his new method of studying nature, which he recognized was a reading of her phenomena: 'I can't tell you how the Book of Nature is becoming readable to me. My long practice in spelling has helped me; it now suddenly works, and my quiet joy is inexpressible.' Again in the summer of the following year: 'It is a growing aware of the Form with which again and again nature plays, and, in playing, brings forth manifold life.'
Then Goethe went on his famous journey to Italy which was to bear such significant fruit for his inner life, both in art and in science. At Michaelmas, 1786, he reports from his visit to the botanical garden in Padua that 'the thought becomes more and more living that it may be possible out of one form to develop all plant forms'. At this moment Goethe felt so near to the basic conception of the plant for which he was seeking, that he already christened it with a special name. The term he coined for it is Urpflanze, literally rendered archetypal plant, or ur-plant, as we propose quite simply to call it.6
It was the rich tropical and sub-tropical vegetation in the botanical gardens in Palermo that helped Goethe to his decisive observations. The peculiar nature of the warmer regions of the earth enables the spirit to reveal itself more intensively than is possible in the temperate zone. Thus in tropical vegetation many things come before the eye which otherwise remain undisclosed, and then can be detected only through an effort of active thought. From this point of view, tropical vegetation is 'abnormal' in the same sense as was the proliferated rose which confirmed for Goethe's physical perception that inner law of plant-growth which had already become clear to his mind.
During his sojourn in Palermo in the spring of 1787 Goethe writes in his notebook: 'There must be one (ur-plant): how otherwise could we recognize this or that formation to be a plant unless they were all formed after one pattern?' Soon after this, he writes in a letter to the poet Herder, one of his friends in Weimar:
'Further, I must confide to you that I am quite close to the secret of plant creation, and that it is the simplest thing imaginable. The ur-plant will be the strangest creature in the world, for which nature herself should envy me. With this model and the key to it one will be able to invent plants ad infinitum; they would be consistent; that is to say, though non-existing, they would be capable of existing, being no shades or semblances of the painter or poet, but possessing truth and necessity. The same law will be capable of extension to all living things.'
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To become more familiar with the conception of the ur-plant, let us bring the life-cycle of the plant before our inner eye once again. There, all the different organs of the plant-leaf, blossom, fruit, etc. - appear as the metamorphic revelations of the one, identical active principle, a principle which gradually manifests itself to us by way of successive heightening from the cotyledons to the perfected glory of the flower. Amongst all the forms which thus appear in turn, that of the leaf has a special place; for the leaf is that organ of the plant in which the ground-plan of all plant existence comes most immediately to expression. Not only do all the different leaf forms arise, through endless changing, out of each other, but the leaf, in accordance with the same principle, also changes itself into all the other organs which the plant produces in the course of its growth.
It is by precisely the same principle that the ur-plant reveals itself in the plant kingdom as a whole. Just as in the single plant organism the different parts are a graduated revelation of the ur-plant, so are the single kinds and species within the total plant world. As we let our glance range over all its ranks and stages (from the single-celled, almost formless alga to the rose and beyond to the tree), we are following, step by step, the revelation of the ur-plant. Barely hinting at itself in the lowest vegetable species, it comes in the next higher stages into ever clearer view, finally streaming forth in full glory in the magnificence of the manifold blossoming plants. Then, as its highest creation, it brings forth the tree, which, itself a veritable miniature earth, becomes the basis for innumerable single plant growths.
It has struck biologists of Goethe's own and later times that contrary to their method he did not build up his study of the plant by starting with its lowest form, and so the reproach has been levelled against him of having unduly neglected the latter. Because of this, the views he had come to were regarded as scientifically unfounded. Goethe's note-books prove that there is no justification for such a reproach. He was in actual fact deeply interested in the lower plants, but he realized that they could not contribute anything fundamental to the spiritual image of the plant as such which he was seeking to attain. To understand the plant he found himself obliged to pay special attention to examples in which it came to its most perfect expression. For what was hidden in the alga was made manifest in the rose. To demand of Goethe that in accordance with ordinary science he should have explained nature 'from below upwards' is to misunderstand the methodological basis of all his investigations.
Seen with Goethe's eyes, the plant kingdom as a whole appears to be a single mighty plant. In it the ur-plant, while pressing into appearance, is seen to observe the very rule which we have found governing its action in the single plant - that of repeated expansion and contraction.7 Taking the tree in the sense already indicated, as the state of highest expansion along the ur-plant's way of entering into spatial manifestation, we note that tree-formation occurs successively at four different levels - as fern-tree (also the extinct tree-form of the horsetail) among the cryptogams, as coniferous tree among the gymnosperms, as palm-tree among the monocotyledons, and lastly in the form of the manifold species of the leaf-trees at the highest level of the plant kingdom, the dicotyledons. All these levels have come successively into existence, as geological research has shown; the ur-plant achieved these various tree-formations successively, thus giving up again its state of expansion each time after having reached it at a particular level.