Man or Matter / Introduction to a Spiritual Understanding of Nature on the Basis of Goethe's Method of Training Observation and Thought - Ernst Lehrs

^{5 Goethe also describes a proliferated pink.}

^{6 The terms 'primeval' or 'primordial' sometimes suggested for rendering the prefix 'ur' are unsuitable in a case like this. 'Primeval plant', for instance, used by some translators of Goethe, raises the misunderstanding - to which Goethe's concept has anyhow been subject from the side of scientific botany - that by his ur-plant he had in mind some primitive, prehistoric plant, the hypothetical ancestor in the Darwinian sense of the present-day plant kingdom.}

^{7 The following observation is not one made by Goethe himself. It is presented here by the author as an example of the heuristic value of Goethe's method of pictorial-dynamic contemplation of the sense-world.}

^{8 'Exakte sinnliche Phantasie.'}

^{9 Entdeckung eines trefflichen Vorarbeiters.}

CHAPTER VI

Except We Become ...

In this chapter we shall concern ourselves with a number of personalities from the more or less recent past of the cultural life of Britain, each of whom was a spiritual kinsman of Goethe, and so a living illustration of the fact that the true source of knowledge in man must be sought, and can be found, outside the limits of his modern adult consciousness. Whilst none of them was a match for Goethe as regards universality and scientific lucidity, they are all characteristic of an immediacy of approach to certain essential truths, which in the sense we mean is not found in Goethe. It enabled them to express one or the other of these truths in a form that makes them suitable as sign-posts on our own path of exploration. We shall find repeated opportunity in the later pages of this book to remember just what these men saw and thought.

The first is Thomas Reid (1710-96), the Scottish philosopher and advocate of common sense as the root of philosophy.¹ After having served for some years as a minister in the Church of Scotland, Reid became professor of Philosophy at the University of Aberdeen, whence he was called to Glasgow as the successor of Adam Smith. Through his birth in Strachan, Kincardine, he belonged to the same part of Scotland from which Kant's ancestors had come. Two brief remarks of Goethe show that he knew of the Scotsman's philosophy, and that he appreciated his influence on contemporary philosophers.²