GOETHE
Science, in so far as it rises above the mere accumulation of facts,
is a product of the mind's creative activity. Scientific theories are
not so much formulae extracted from experience as intuitions imposed
upon experience. So it was that Goethe, who was little more than a
dilettante,[70] seized upon the essential principles of a morphology
some years before that morphology was accepted by the workers.
Goethe is important in the history of morphological method because he
was the first to bring to clear consciousness and to express in
definite terms the idea on which comparative anatomy before him was
based, the idea of the unity of plan. We have seen that this idea was
familiar to Aristotle and that it was recognised implicitly by all who
after him studied structure comparatively. In Goethe's time the idea
had become ripe for expression. It was used as a guiding principle in
Goethe's youth particularly by Vicq d'Azyr and by Camper. The former
(1748-1794), who discovered[71] in the same year as Goethe (1784) the
intermaxillary bone in man, pointed out the homology in structure
between the fore limb and the hind limb, and interpreted certain
rudimentary bones, the intermaxillaries and rudimentary clavicles, in
the light of the theory that Vertebrates are built upon one single
plan of structure.
"Nature seems to operate always according to an original and general
plan, from which she departs with regret and whose traces we come
across everywhere" (Vicq d'Azyr, quoted by Flourens, _Mem. Acad.
Sei._, XXIII., p. xxxvi.).
Peter Camper (1722-1789), we are told by Goethe himself in his
_Osteologie_, was convinced of the unity of plan holding throughout
Vertebrates; he compared in particular the brain of fishes with the
brain of man.
The idea of the unity of plan had not yet become limited and defined
as a strictly scientific theory; it was an idea common to philosophy,
to ordinary thought, and to anatomical science. We find it expressed
by Herder (who perhaps got it from Kant) in his _Ideen sur Philosophie
der Geschichte der Menschheit_ (1784), and it is possible that Goethe
became impressed with the importance of the idea through his
conversations with Herder. Be that as it may, it is certain that
Goethe sought for the intermaxillaries in man only because he was
firmly convinced that the skeleton in all the higher animals was built
upon one common plan and that accordingly bones such as the
intermaxillaries, found well developed in some animals, must also be
found in man. The idea was not drawn from the facts, but the facts
were interpreted and even sought for in the light of the idea. "I
eagerly worked upon a general osteological scheme, and had accordingly
to assume that all the separate parts of the structure, in detail as
in the whole, must be discoverable in all animals, because on this
supposition is built the already long begun science of comparative
anatomy."[72]
The principle comes to clear expression in his _Erster Entwurf einer
allgemeinen Einleitung in die vergleichende Anatomie_ (1795).[73] He
writes:--"On this account an attempt is here made to arrive at an
anatomical type, a general picture in which the forms of all animals
are contained in potentia, and by means of which we can describe each
animal in an invariable order."[74] His aim is to discover a general
scheme of the constant in organic parts, a scheme into which all
animals will fit equally well, and no animal better than the rest.
When we remember that the type to which anatomists before him had,
consciously or unconsciously, referred all other structure was man
himself, we see that in seeking after an abstract generalised type
Goethe was reaching out to a new conception. The fact that only the
structure of man and the higher animals was at all well-known in his
time led Goethe to think that his general Typus would hold for the
lower animals as well, though it was to be arrived at primarily from a
study of the higher animals. All he could assert of the entire animal
kingdom was that all animals agreed in having a head, a middle part,
and an end part, with their characteristic organs, and that
accordingly they might, in this respect at least, be reduced to one
common Typus. Goethe's knowledge of the lower animals was not
extensive.
Though Goethe did not work out a criterion of the homology of parts
with any great clearness, he had an inkling of the principle later
developed by E. Geoffroy St Hilaire, and called by him the "Principle
of Connections." According to this principle, the homology of a part
is determined by its position relative to other parts. Goethe
expresses it thus:--"On the other hand the most constant factor is the
position in which the bone is invariably found, and the function to
which it is adapted in the organic edifice."[75] But from this sentence
it is not clear that Goethe understood the principle as one of form
independent of function, for he seems to consider that the homology of
an organ is partly determined by the function which it performs for
the whole. He wavers between the purely formal or morphological
interpretation of the principle of connections and the functional. We
find him in the additions to the _Entwurf_ (1796), saying:--"We must
take into consideration not merely the spatial relations of the parts,
but also their living reciprocal influence, their dependence upon and
action on one another." [76] But in seeking for the intermaxillary bone
in man he was guided by its position relative to the maxillaries--it
must be the bone between the anterior ends of the maxillaries, a bone
whose limits are indicated in the adult only by surface grooves.
As a matter of fact Goethe's morphological views are neither very
clearly expressed nor very consistent. This comes out in his treatment
of the relation between structure and function. Sometimes he takes the
view that structure determines function. "The parts of the animal," he
writes, "their reciprocal forms, their relations, their particular
properties determine the life and habits of the creature."[77] We are
not to explain, he says, the tusks of the _Babirussa_ by their
possible use, but we must ask how it comes to have tusks. In the same
way we must not suppose that a bull has horns in order to gore, but we
must investigate the process by which it comes to have horns to gore
with. This is the rigorous morphological view. On the other hand he
admits elsewhere that function may influence form. Apparently he did
not work out his ideas on this point to logical clearness, and Radl[78]
is probably correct in saying that the following quotation with its
double assertion represents most nearly Goethe's position:--
"Also bestimmt die Gestalt die Lebensweise des Thieres, Und die Weise
zu leben, sie wirkt auf alle Gestalten Maechtig zurueck."[79]
His best piece of purely morphological work was his theory of the
metamorphosis of plants. Stripped of its vaguer elements, and of the
crude attempt to explain differences in the character of plant organs
by differences in the degree of "refinement" of the sap supplied to
them, the theory is that stem-leaves, sepals, petals, and stamens are
all identical members or appendages. These appendages differ from one
another only in shape and in degree of expansion, stem-leaves being
expanded, sepals contracted, petals expanded, and so on alternately.
It is equally correct to call a stamen a contracted petal, and a petal
an expanded stamen, for no one of the organs is the type of the
others, but all equally are varieties of a single abstract
plant-appendage.
What Goethe considered he had proved for the appendages of plants he
extended to all living things. Every living thing is a complex of
living independent beings, which "der Idee, der Anlage nach," are the
same, but in appearance may be the same or similar, different or
unlike.[80] Not only is there a primordial animal and a primordial
plant, schematic forms to which all separate species are referable,
but the parts of each are themselves units, which "der Idee nach," are
identical _inter se_. This fantasy can hardly be taken seriously as a
scientific theory; it seems, however, to have been what guided Goethe
in his "discovery" of the vertebral nature of the skull. Just as the
fore limb can be homologised with the hind limb, so, reasoning by
analogy, the skull should be capable of being homologised with the
vertebrae. To what ludicrous extremes this doctrine of the repetition
of parts within the organism was pushed we shall see when we consider
the theories of the German transcendentalists of the early nineteenth
century.
Though Goethe's morphological views were lacking in definiteness he
hit upon one or two ideas which proved useful. Thus he enunciated the
"law of balance" long before Etienne Geoffroy St Hilaire, the law
"that to no part can anything be added, without something being taken
away from another part, and _vice versa_."[81] He saw, too, what a help
to the interpretation of adult structure the study of the embryo would
be, for many bones which are fused in the adult are separate in the
embryo.[82] This also was a point to which the later transcendentalists
gave considerable attention.
So far we have spoken of Goethe as if he were merely the prophet of
formal morphology; we have pointed out how he brought to clear
expression the morphological principle implicit in the idea of unity
of type, and how he seized upon some important guiding ideas, such as
the principle of connections. But Goethe was not a formalist, and he
was very far from the static conception of life which is at the base
of pure morphology. His interest was not in _Gestalt_ or fixed form,
_Bildung_ or form change. He saw that _Gestalt_ was but a momentary
phase of _Bildung_, and could be considered apart and in itself only
by an abstraction fatal to all understanding of the living thing.
Mephistopheles scoffs at the scholars who would explain a living
creature by anatomising it:
"Dann hat er die Theile in seiner Hand,
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 ueber 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."
[74] Cotta ed., ix., p. 463.
[75] Cotta ed., p. 478.
[76] _Loc. cit._, p. 491.
[77] _Entwurf_, Cotta ed., ix., p. 465.
[78] _Geschichte der biologischen Theorien_, i., p. 266.
[79] "So the form determines the manner of life of the
animal, and the manner of life in its turn reacts
powerfully upon all forms."
[80] _Bildung und Umbildung organischer Naturen_, 1807.
[81] Cotta ed., ix., p. 466.
[82] _Loc. cit._, pp. 474-5.
[83] Then he has all the parts within his hand, excepting
only, sad to say, the living bond.
[84] Goethe was the inventor of the word.
[85] Cotta ed., ix., p. 490.