Here under follows the transcription of the chapter Goethe of Houston Stewart Chamberlain's Immanuel Kant, published by John Lane, The Bodley Head, 1914.

Goethe as a young man. From an engraving after Georg Oswald May (1779).

GOETHE AS A YOUNG MAN
From an engraving after Georg Oswald May (1779).


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The original text in German: Immanuel Kant
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See also the reviews of this book:
Kant in the 20th century. Review in the London Times Literary Supplement, 1914
Kritische Urteile über Chamberlain's Kant. Collection of reviews in german, 1909
 
 

VOLUME I page
INTRODUCTORY 3
GOETHE 13
LEONARDO 101
DESCARTES 197
BRUNO 311




VOLUME II
PLATO 3
KANT 169
NOTES 415
INDEX 513

11
GOETHE

IDEA AND EXPERIENCE

WITH AN EXCURSUS ON THE DOCTRINE
OF METAMORPHOSIS
 

Where object and subject touch
one another — there is life.
Goethe.

12
(Blank page)

13
GOETHE
THE manner in which a man looks upon the problems of life and of the world, in other words his philosophy, is born with him; it is the necessary result of his way of “seeing.“ We may admit that the limits of the peculiar form in which he gradually works out this inborn quality of his into a more and more perfected embodiment, and first becomes conscious of its possession, arise like a network of diagonal lines out of his own original self, under the influence of the workings of his time and his surroundings; still, at the root of all is the personality.
     The development of the soul is like that of the body: encouragements and hindrances crop up, asserting their power at every step; nor can we afford to lose sight of the following considerations. If in the life's work of a great thinker we are content to compare the doctrines and the systematic construction in his labours at different stages of his existence, or to collect utterances and opinions upon any special question drawn from every nook and corner of the overflowing intellectual treasure-house of genius, we shall easily bring to light a whole chaos of contradictions. There is no great cleverness in that. It is the way in which to create the impression of uncertainty and unreality; the consistency of the thinker's philosophy is apparently destroyed. If, however, we look more closely, we shall face these uncertain wavering utterances of the thinking brain with special attention, inasmuch as it is just in these inconsistencies

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that the fight of the one man defending his own against the surrounding world of prejudice is revealed, and in no other way can the special and distinguishing features of the individual be laid bare. This is conspicuously seen in Kant, for in his case it is not, as in that of Schopenhauer, for instance, the uniformity of a systematic method of thinking which gives consistency to his work in the field of philosophy, but the practical combination in one living personality of very different, indeed almost contradictory, intellectual faculties. I think, therefore, that you will penetrate into Kant's work with greater ease and surety, if in the first place you become familiar with the rich world of his personality.
    Men who wish to become acquainted with the philosophy of Immanuel Kant are apt to plunge with all the boldness of insanity into that most difficult of all the works of the world's literature, the Critique of Pure Reason; most of them soon lose courage, and end by contenting themselves with reading the chapter on Kant in some history of philosophy. I would urge you to follow me on a different road. I would urge you, before venturing upon the study of any of Kant's various writings, and before attempting to assign to this rare man any place in history, to learn to appreciate those essential features of his intellectual existence which differentiate him from all other thinkers, and so to become familiar with his life's work. I am not looking so much to the outward aspects of his personality as to his intellectual faculties, considering them, so far as may be, apart from the accidental conditions of time and space. History is apt to blind us to that which is eternal. The details of Kant's life, his fate here upon earth, are accessible to you from all manner of books. For a knowledge of his character I would refer you to the three little sketches by his contemporaries, Borowski, Jachmann, and Vasianski. 1 His philosophical teaching is

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dealt with in thousands of books and essays in all the languages of Europe. 2 Naturally we too must draw upon these various sources; but we shall not dwell too much upon them, for our object lies in another direction. It must be our aim to ascertain what was the original nature of Kant's intellect; how he looked out upon the world; how he worked up in his soul the impressions which he received; in what manner he was bound to think. We wish to know what intellectual materials he assimilated, and what he rejected; what were the intellectual achievements for which he was specially qualified, for what on the other hand he had little aptitude or none. We wish to investigate the motive powers which gradually impelled him to devote himself to the most abstract thinking, and which gave him the perseverance necessary for his herculean labours. Above all, we shall endeavour, silently and attentively, to keep watch while he thinks, so that by practical appreciation we may become acquainted, if not with the artistic whole of his finished thought-structure, at any rate with the special features of the world in which he lived and worked according to the dictates of his natures. In short, we desire to investigate the individuality of the Thinker, the qualities of his intellectual personality. That will without doubt result in our arriving at the distinguishing peculiarity of his work, at any rate in its larger and more general features, and that will lay the foundation for further study hereafter.
    How can such a task be accomplished? To my mind there is but one way, that of comparison. “Nous ne pouvons acquérir de connaissances que par la voie de la comparaison,“ says Buffon, the great naturalist. 3 For a theoretical description presupposes a whole series of definitions, and in the face of life all definitions shrivel up into figures of speech. Except in the case of mathematics and logic, in which definitions deal with the formal

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aspect of universally accepted schemes of perception and comprehension, all attempts at defining rest upon the fundamental disregard of the single individual; for example, in Zoology or Botany we define a species, whilst we are only calling attention to that which is common to the different individuals, whereas the peculiarity of the single individual, even of its outer form, is made up of a hundred features, which defy all verbal description. There is no such thing as a “science“ of the individual. And this holds good if instead of the outward and visible form we take into consideration the invisible inner nature. In such cases, on the contrary, generalities mean little or nothing and, unless we are guided by ample and very exact perception, are almost always misleading. If, for instance, I read that “the predominance of abstract thought over concrete thought is characteristic of Kant,“ how am I the richer? I have only gained a phrase which may be indisputable, but is yet no more than a phrase, and indisputable only in so far as it contains nothing but a nebulous generality. No one can think without perceiving, and no one can perceive unless he can form ideas. We shall see presently that Kant's intellect possessed a peculiar power of perception, whereas many of the so-called intuitive thinkers, that is to say men who devote themselves rather to ocular perception, like Goethe for example, continually mix up utterly unimaginable thoughts with their so-called intuition. We cannot hope to arrive at a conception of the individuality of an intellect by mere verbal portraiture. This would give us at most but a flat picture, whereas I am penetrated with the desire to furnish you with a perfect plastic representation. Comparison alone can serve us to this end. We are apt to undervalue the intellectual differences between man and man; they are immense, not only in respect of plus and minus, but also in respect of the “how“ in men of equal importance.

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Here we shall find that Nature has prescribed to the thinking of each individual limits from which there is no escape, a matter to which we shall call attention in a future lecture. It follows that if we choose the right men for the purpose of our comparison, the strong shadows cast by these models will bring the picture of Kant's mind, — the peculiar characteristics of his world of thought, — more and more into relief.
    The first important consideration is, whom should we choose for our models? I do not propose to start by justifying my choice; its worth must prove itself. One thing only I will say, which is that I cannot endorse the views of the average modern German who in the Philosopher sees no more than a species of the genus Professor. We need not undervalue the meritorious activities of the expert, especially in the investigation and exposition of the history of human thought, and in the education of our sons; and yet we have a right to require that some distinction should be drawn between professional knowledge and genius. Kant himself lays stress upon this. 4 We do not bestow the title of artist upon a man who is a professor of the history and theory of art; nor do we for an instant compare him with those divinely favoured men, whose work has given birth to the material for a science of art. We should make the same distinction here. “Pure Philosophy is a product of Genius,“ says Kant, and Goethe repeats the same in his own fashion.
Is it only the poet that is born? The philosopher is born no less.
Truth can after all only be seen when brought into form.
All that we consciously perceive, all our ideas concerning intellectual and moral entities, all our pictures of the world at our feet and of the cosmic universe, come to us as the inventions of single supreme intellects. An image conveying the sense of the unseen; a thought

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which gives intelligible shape to that which is seen, — a combination of a series of disjointed phenomena into one connected whole, — are just as much a work of creation as an epic or tone-poem. 5 The mere expression of such a thought is not sufficient to give it life and enable it to bear fruit; it must at the very outset possess certain potentialities with which genius alone can endow it; it must be “brought into form,“ otherwise it could not be perceived. These are matters which we are apt to forget in the indolent enjoyment of what has become an hereditary intellectual property. It is little by little that our store of ideas, “rendering possible this system of philosophy,“ has grown rich, but the process has been very slow. Up to the present time thoughts capable of illuminating have been few and far between; and the incitements to new thoughts and new surveys of the world have for the most part arisen not out of philosophy, but out of the progress made in natural science and mathematics, or out of absorption in religious sentiment. That may possibly be the reason why, of the thinkers who have made epoch in the world, hardly one has been a philosopher by profession, and why the world has no reason to congratulate itself upon the period when in the nineteenth century the “pure philosophers“ ruled almost alone. 6 Even Kant started his career as a savant not with philosophy, but with mathematics, physics, and theoretical astronomy. He was originally professor of mathematics, and owed his chair of philosophy not to the wisdom of the university authorities, but to the accident that his colleague who occupied that chair was desirous of an exchange of duties. Even in his ripest old age Kant preferred to read about anthropology, geography, physics, mathematics, and the science of fortification; whereas he never once lectured upon his own metaphysical doctrine. He was led to his investigations of the whole range of the human intellect by the

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necessity of securing an indestructible foundation for practical philosophy, that is to say “the method of educating and ruling mankind“ (Letters, 1, ‚38), — and for exact natural science. In the letter which I have just quoted he says, with a sigh, “I shall be glad when I shall have brought my transcendental philosophy to a conclusion.“ Here there is one more reflection to be made. Logic and dialectics, which together with history make up, and properly so, the main subject of so-called “philosophical“ education, have no significance beyond that of a discipline. It is impossible, in spite of all attempts, to compare them with mathematics, — for mathematics, at any rate geometry, which is their only constructive branch, are perception, and even though this perception be subject to certain limitations, it still, being perception, leads us on further and further; its growth knows no end, and its interchange of relations with all sciences is endowed with perpetual life and newness. Logic, on the contrary, is nothing but a school of method. We may admit that that is no small matter, but what we must learn to recognise here is the fact that a knowledge of logic, like reading, writing, and arithmetic, can at most only indirectly contribute to the building up of a system of philosophy. Logic is like a mill, a mill incapable of extension, but in the use of which we can, by practice, to a certain limited extent perfect ourselves. A mill, however, is of no use unless there be grist to grind, and this grist is no produce of the stark, lifeless millstones, but grows out in the open, germinating in the dark mystery of the earth, coaxed into life by the burning rays of the far distant sun.
    This is why, in our wish to compare other men with Kant, we shall lay no stress upon their belonging, or not belonging, to any special guild of learning; it is its area, its illuminating power, its creative fullness, and its organic consistency which lend value to a system of

20 GOETHE
philosophy. It is for that reason that in a former work * I have proposed to draw upon the wealth of the German language in order to distinguish between “philosophy“ and the German word “Weltanschauung.“ The word philosophy, borrowed from the Greek, must always bear the meaning of a learned or scholastic discipline. The German word implies a predisposition allied to religion and mythology, altogether human, but developed in all manner of different directions, with a network of roots nourished by art and science, by philosophy and mathematics, a tendency the foremost aim of which is to establish a harmony between the outer eye and the inner eye, or should this figure of speech be too bold, between seeing and thinking and conduct. 7 If, then, we should press into our service the words philosopher and Weltanschauer, † drawing the same distinction as we have done between philosophy and Weltanschauung, we should know exactly what manner of men to select for the purpose of comparison. Not every philosopher has been a Weltanschauer, and the great Weltanschauers have been poets, painters, statesmen, physicians, priests, mathematicians, historians, — now and again also, philosophers.
    For reasons which will by and by reveal themselves, and which I venture to hope will be justified, I have chosen for the purpose of comparison, the following five men: Goethe, Leonardo da Vinci, René Descartes, Giordano Bruno, Plato. I shall devote a lecture to each of these, not indeed with the object of giving a complete account of their several systems of philosophy, but in order to analyse the method of each one, and to contrast it with that of Kant. As a matter of course, Kant must be the first consideration throughout; a sixth lecture must

    * The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century, German Edition, p. 736. [English edition: vol. ii, p. 241].
    † A man who observes or contemplates the systems of the universe, moral and physical.

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be given up entirely to him, while the results of the previous lectures will be turned to account and summarised in its interests.
    Much might be added as to the plan which I have in view but I think that for the present the above indications will be sufficient. The names of Goethe, Leonardo, Descartes, Bruno, and Plato are known to everybody; they are all that is necessary as a first guide on the road over which I hope to travel in your company. I do not wish to tie myself down to any tedious hard-and-fast scheme, but propose to deal with the subject-matter in each lecture just as the instinct of the moment may suggest. The man who pursues some living thing is a hunter; all his senses must be on the alert, he must know when to wait and when to strike. There shall be no ostentation of learning, nothing at any rate which might in the professional sense be called learning. I am but a layman who is addressing laymen. We will not quibble about words, we will only keep our eyes open for an unprejudiced observation of that which is obvious to every man who takes the trouble to watch. Kant himself, in his severe way, says, “Subtle errors have an attraction for self-conceit which delights in the consciousness of its own strength, whereas obvious truths, on the contrary, are easily grasped by common sense.“ 8 That which is best is the common inheritance of us all; for, as the Bible points out, God has given us eyes that we may see. Besides this our aim shows us the road which we must follow, and in kindly fashion limits our task. We cannot even make an attempt at anything like completeness, save only in the perfect plasticity of every conception at which we arrive. We shall make it a principle to avoid busying ourselves with any particular thought until we are equipped with a sufficient material for perception; on the other hand, as soon as we have a clear sight of such a thing, we shall spare no time, but turn the subject

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over and over again, until we have investigated it through and through. In order to furnish such subject-matter as may be indispensable to perception, I shall in each lecture introduce an excursus which, though it may appear to lead us away from the subject, will in reality help us to grasp it. “How,“ says Kant, “can we gain sense and significance for our conceptions, unless we supply them with some form of perception, which must be an example drawn from a possible experience?“ 9
    In these lectures I do not aim at an interpretation of Kant's theoretical teaching; what I look to is perhaps more limited, but certainly more difficult; my object is nothing less than to draw near to Kant, — to enter his actual presence. The worst fault in the civilisation by which we are surrounded, is that it paralyses the intellect. Our obligatory school curriculum and the pressure on all sides that cramps us on leaving school, forcing us into definite paths, acts as a stencil on our method of thought; the press does the rest; under its fateful gorgon-glance every feeble attempt at independence is nipped in the bud. Without the power of motion there can be no such thing as understanding. When Kant says, “we only understand that which we do ourselves,“ he of course means his dictum to be applied as a criticism of recognition, and is referring to the human intellect in general; but it is a saying which is applicable to all understanding. In order really to understand a given personality in the methods of perception which are peculiar to it, — not merely entering into arguments as to the doctrines which are the result of that perception, — we need the faculty of imitating its special methods, its predilections, tricks and knacks, in short, of working and constructing, as it is wont to do itself. Kant often asserts that outward imitation leads to inward sympathy; for instance, if you always answer a sulky young girl with a friendly smile, by degrees she will be converted to amiability! 10

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A joke that is full of the deepest sense. If Kant is as a rule little understood, if his writings are considered too difficult, it is above all because his personality in its intellectual peculiarity is utterly unknown. We, however are apt not to trouble ourselves about that, but must needs go straight ahead, deluding ourselves with the idea that out of a series of words strung together, we can simply and without more ado become acquainted with his perceptions. That could only be the case if Kant had nothing new to tell us. The meaning of a word, apart from the hard-and-fast stencil of it, is always fluctuating. A word is no coin representing an equal value as it is passed from hand to hand. On the contrary, the word grows with the man who utters it; it may be broad or narrow, definite or indefinite, rich or poor, brilliant or colourless, according to the intellect whose servant it is; it travels in space so that the range of ideas which the same word reaches is often quite unequal in various persons, — ideas sometimes hardly intersecting one another. How specially is this the case with a Kant ambitious of effecting a Copernican revolution! And yet that very upheaval must be carried out with the old words; how otherwise would he make himself understood? But how are we to give a right value to the old words if they carry a new meaning? There is no royal road out of this dilemma, for we can only understand a man's thoughts from his words, and his words from his thoughts. And so it may be justifiable to attempt the paradox of setting the conception before the doctrine, and to represent the personality out of its work, not in its work, — justifiable not as a universal method, and yet as one among many methods.
    One last remark and I shall have brought these introductory considerations to a close.
    The road on which I hope to act as your guide will not lead to a knowledge of learned and professional philosophy. What I have already said is enough to show that; still,

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I am bound to insist upon this fact clearly, expressly, and once for all. In order to grasp what lies at the root of an individual's peculiar way of thinking, more mobility and dexterity of mind are required than what the professional philosopher can claim, or even allow, when exposing his abstract system; but, of course, this mobility has to submit to special limitations; we cannot study personality and systematic philosophy at one and the same time. As Goethe says in a famous sonnet, “not only does the master mind reveal itself in its very limitations,“ but, as we see in every form of life, whatever is “masterly“ arises only within such limitations. When we burst the barriers we wreck the form. We shall often have to allude to philosophical theorems in these lectures; but it is not the theorems but the personalities of the thinkers that are the centre of interest; there it is that we shall find the informing law. Put this idea into a formula and it would run, — it is not the thoughts that count, but the method of thinking out of which those thoughts proceed. Thinking, however, is revealed in thought, and thus it is clear that the material with which we have to deal is in the main the same as that which has been worked up by professional philosophy; for long distances we shall have to travel close along the frontier, and shall have before our eyes the same boundary stones as the professional philosophers. But we shall take our survey from a different point of the compass from theirs, and so see in another light and in another perspective. The same thought will assume a different form. That is what you must never forget, otherwise you will be expecting from me something outside of the scope of my undertaking, and will feel disappointed when you find that a laborious study of the works of the learned still lies before you; at the same time you might easily undervalue the significance of my attempts. Against both of these ideas I enter my protest.

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    To-day, then, we shall speak of Goethe, that is to say, we shall compare Goethe's method of seeing and of treating what he sees, with that of Kant.
    Goethe himself challenges the parallel. After praising Kant in a conversation with Eckermann as the “most pre-eminent of all philosophers,“ and declaring that Kant's thoughts had penetrated German culture to such a depth, that from that time forth even those who had never read him could by no possibility escape from his influence, he makes the following remarkable observation: “Instinctively I followed the same road as Kant.“ It is well that we should have this upon the authority of Goethe himself, otherwise I should run the risk of being accused of hairbrained paradox, if not of the audacity of a dilettante, for daring to claim relationship to one another for two such opposites. But Goethe was a man every one of whose words might be weighed in a goldsmith's scales; so when he says, “I instinctively followed the same road as Kant,“ he is making a clear, distinct, and decisive statement, which no one can pass by unheeded. In talking with Eckermann Goethe certainly thought it unnecessary to bring forward any deep reason for what he said, but confined himself to a few cursory explanations of little value — for Eckermann was but meagrely equipped in philosophy, and at that time was generally unacquainted with Kant's writings. On the other hand, we possess elsewhere in Goethe's works ample justification of this remarkable statement, more especially in the precious series of short essays, Einwirkung der neueren Philosophie, Anschauende Urteilskraft, Bedenken und Ergebung, and in many other places. But even if we were not in possession of these documents, I would pledge myself to show, from the life's work of the two men, the meaning of the words, “I followed the same road as Kant.“
    Any detailed account of the influence of Kant upon

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Goethe's method of thought would be out of place here. Without embarking upon history, our only desire is to lay stress upon the fact of the close relationship between the two. In regard to this a remark of Goethe's own is of importance: “It is by no means a matter of indifference at what period of life we come under the influence of a strange personality; that it was upon my mature age that Kant made his influence felt had a deep significance for me.“ It is easy to see what he means if we compare the rest of his utterances about Kant. Had they been received prematurely the germs of such a searching analysis of thought, the mature work of a man who was, as it were, born fully mature, would have threatened the independence of Goethe's power of perception; as it happened, Kant entered his horizon of thought at the psychological moment, and gave him, as Schiller did, something which he had not possessed up to that time, although it must have lain dormant within him. “For the first time,“ says Goethe of his maiden attempt to penetrate the Critique of Pure Reason, “a theory seemed to smile upon me.“ 11 And yet this work was but little fitted to serve a Goethe as an introduction to an appreciation of Kant. The real intimacy only began with the Critique of the Power of Judgment, of which Goethe said that he was indebted to it for “a most happy epoch in his life.“ In Goethe's mouth the word “epoch“ is worthy of note. For the full ripeness of Goethe's existence, comprising the last forty years of his life, remained under the influence of Kant, or to put it better, Goethe's philosophy from that time forth stood in reciprocal sympathy with that of Kant. 12 In March, 1791, Goethe was already deep in Kant's writings; for the Goethe archives contain a notebook of that date with extracts all in Goethe's handwriting. Not long afterwards came the decisive influence of the intimacy with Kant's most talented disciple, — Schiller. Goethe himself bears witness, — “over and over

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again I returned to Kant's teaching ... and gained much for my everyday use.“ For in the meanwhile he had once more taken up the Critique of Pure Reason, and he had succeeded, as he tells us, in “penetrating more deeply into it,“ and that indeed because he had recognised that it was impossible to estimate Kant's philosophy by means of that fragment of it which is contained in the Critique of Reason, but that his different works, “all the children of one brain, are continually interdependent.“ It is no matter of wonder, then, that the old man who had grown so anxiously scrupulous in the use of his predicates, should love to speak of Kant in superlatives. So in 1825 he writes of “our glorious Kant,“ and in 1830 of the “boundless gratitude which the aged Kant has earned for himself of the world and, I may add, of myself.“ 13 And six months before his death he says emphatically of Kant's philosophy, “it made me watch over myself — an enormous point gained.“ 14
    Though this historical connection is only interesting parenthetically, I have thought well to say so much briefly as a general guide to the understanding of a relation which almost all Goethe's biographers have deliberately left unnoticed. 15 Let us now without further delay turn our attention to the living personality.
    A page or two back I alluded to the allusion in the Bible as to the gift of eyes that we may see. If ever a man was gifted with eyes that he might see it was Goethe. Just as the heart is the living centre of our body, from which all the blood ebbs and to which it flows again, so is the eye the centre of Goethe's intellectual life; he says himself, “The eye has been the organ above all others with which I have grasped the world“ (Wahrheit und Dichtung, Book 6). Almost all the decisive impressions of his life are received through the eye: in order to love Schiller he must see him. His eye is an organ which there is no satisfying, and what it has seen

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it retains, changing it into flesh and blood and bones. “I am just one of those Ephesian goldsmiths, who pass their whole lives in watching and wondering and adoring the marvellous temple of the Goddess, and in copying her mysterious forms.“ Thus spoke Goethe as a man of sixty-three, 16 and herein lies the secret of the wonderful phenomenon that Goethe never ceases to grow, that even as an old man with every returning spring, like a venerable oak tree, he puts forth leaves as fresh and green and young as a sapling in its first year. The process of nourishment never ceases. It is the eye which establishes the connection between the individual and nature: the other senses take a second place: the intellect on the other hand — whether it be a simple ganglion in the first segment of the earthworm, or a powerfully developed brain-substance inclosed in the hard skull, is always lying hidden in unattainable depths, separated from the world, a born egotist. The eye is the bridge. What would be the use of this bridge — the eye — unless somewhere in the darkness of the fortress there were a king waiting for his guests, a magic-working king, transforming all things at his pleasure, ordering all things in the manifold boundlessness of nature after a human standard, and out of the world of law and insensibility fashioning a world of Freedom and the soul? Manifestly, however, it must make a great difference whether an individual throws the weight of his activity inwards or outwards, whether he is contented with as few impressions as possible from without, and takes his delight in working these up, or whether he stands night and day on the watch, seeking to enrich himself with new and yet newer treasures of thought. The words of his own watchman, Lynceus, are in the fullest sense applicable to Goethe — “Born to see, trained to perceive.“ Indeed these words carry a double meaning. His eyes were “born“ with the gracious gift of seeing, but they were

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beyond that systematically and strictly “trained“ from his youth up. Goethe's intellectual development might be described as a conscious and self-imposed consummation of the power of sight. Here we have a process of will running parallel with the law of nature in regard to the progressive advance of age. In youth it is the artistic sight of the soul which is dominant. “The world around me and heaven rest in my soul like the image of the beloved.“ 17 Later on it is the method of perception of the maturing man which comes to the front, observing incessantly, enquiring, comparing, seeking to understand nature in her being and in her processes; when he nears his sixtieth year Goethe confesses, “Though it was a pain to me at first, I had at last to think myself lucky that while the artistic sense was threatening gradually to leave me, the scientific sense developed itself with more and more force in eye and mind,“ 18 and while thus the watchman's eye was adapting itself with instructive wisdom to the changes wrought by years, the magician-king, working in secret, was in harmony with him, forming new conceptions out of new impressions. Thus, for example, we see Goethe's religion lifting itself out of the fanatic mysticism of his youth, — when the only reproach which he could find against the Roman Catholic faith was that it did not recognise a sufficient number of sacraments, — to the stern loftiness of his religion of the four venerations with their mystic symbolism and simple worship of nature. Here again in his inmost soul he mirrors what his eye has seen.
    It would be carrying owls to Athens were I to attempt by examples to prove to a German audience the predominant part played by the eye in Goethe's life. In this respect his poems speak for themselves, and need no commentary: his scientific discoveries — the intermaxillary bone, the law of antagonism in colours, etc.— are all the practical outcome of his power of sight: his

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contributions to natural science — his doctrine of metamorphosis, and his studies in optics, are in reality not scientific theories, but anti-theoretic expositions of facts actually observed. To see! to see! to see! was the law of each succeeding day. “Goethe sees at every pore,“ says Emerson. His duties and labours were indeed manifold. From inspector of mines, examiner of accounts, and philologist, to theatrical manager, newspaper editor, and experimentalist in physics, he was pretty well everything that a man can be, and under the pressure of business one thing after another was apt to fade out of his horizon, — even poetry was often laid aside. But to one thing Goethe remained faithful during almost every day of his long and rich life, and that thing was devotion to architecture, sculpture, and painting. However much he might be engaged in enriching the store of what he had seen with his eyes, — from the observation of the earth's crust, and the revelations of the deepest shafts sunk into its bowels, to the watching of cloud forms and the play of colour between light and shade, — however busy he might be in adding to his knowledge by studies in anatomical museums, by microscopical and telescopical work, by experiments in optics, and much more besides, — there was hardly a day in Goethe's life when he was not, in addition to all this, actively and systematically at work, studying sketches, engravings, paintings, numismatics, plans, and elevations of architecturally important buildings, or painting and drawing with his own hand, — and, when he was on his travels, visiting monuments, galleries, collections, and the like. This was the passion of his first youth, and when he was actually dying, he spoke of pencil sketches of which, in his delusion, he believed himself to be turning over the leaves. In him, then, the exercise of the eye was not merely passive, but uninterruptedly active and creative. Of the significance of this in forming an opinion of the

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great thinker Goethe you will be able to judge from words which he wrote as early as his twentieth year. “How certain and how enlightening to me has been the strange and almost incomprehensible aphorism that the studio of a great artist does more for the development of the philosopher in embryo and the poet than the lecture room of the worldly-wise and the critic“ (Letters, 9, 11, 68), and so “through art to wisdom“ was Goethe's motto. In his case the philosopher and the poet walked hand in hand: they were not contradictions, but two sides of his character, each the complement of the other.
    Here we have the important point, for in it lies the whole essence of the contrast with Kant, and if we rightly grasp its significance we shall be able to realise many other points of contrast in the mental portrait which we form to ourselves of the two men. For instance, the constant living flow of development, to which I have called attention, is a necessary result of the predominant power of the eye. The eye can seize no more than what is present before it. The man who surrenders himself entirely to its influence, will always be passionately attached to the immediate impression which is partly conveyed by the object itself, and partly by the capricious nature of his own eye. Kant, as you will presently see, guards himself mistrustfully against any such influence, — he shuts his eye: Goethe on the contrary does homage to the “almost incomprehensible aphorism“ that the philosopher can only rise up like the grass-haulm under the sunbeam of the open eye.
    The most generally known example of the capricious impressionability of Goethe's eye is his attitude towards Gothic art. Brought up from childhood in the belief that Gothic and want of taste were synonymous, as a young man he shudders at the very thought of Strasburg Cathedral, “at the sight of a monstrosity all twists and curls.“ 19 He goes there and, standing before it, finds

32 GOETHE
“the work to be so sublime that he can only bow his head in adoration.“ Every German knows the glorious first sheet in Goethe's work on German architecture, dated 1772, in which he apostrophises the creator of the Cathedral: “Thanks to thy teaching, thou genius, thy depths no longer make me giddy. Into my soul there falls a drop of the blissful repose of the spirit that can look down upon such a creation below, and, like God, declare that 'it is good.' “ But Goethe left Strasburg, and it so chanced that for many years he had no opportunity of seeing any important specimens of Gothic work: 20 he himself tells us, “the impression died out, and I hardly remembered the conditions in which such a sight awoke in me the liveliest enthusiasm.“ 21 The eye seems to be incapable of memory, and even though Goethe like every true genius was gifted with a marvellous memory, no lingering remembrance could be expected to hold its own against the living impression of the moment in an individual with such extraordinarily artistic faculties; so he renounces his earlier faith, and will have no more to say to “the sturdy, coarse, German soul,“ which inspired his first artist-hymn, nor to the “most wood-cut of all figures,“ of “the manly Albrecht Dürer“ which he once loved; for like the German kings of old, he too had crossed the Alps, and had been caught into the toils of foreign beauty. When he had been no more than ten days in Venice, and had become intoxicated with new artistic impressions, he wrote of Gothic art, “Thank Heaven I am quit of that for ever!“ 22 But that was not to be the last word. Goethe was some sixty years old when his acquaintance with the brothers Boisserée induced him once more to interest himself in Gothic architecture, and not in architecture alone, but also in Dutch and old German painting. Goethe dived deeply into the study of the paintings of the Van Eycks and Lucas Cranach, and wrote about them with fine warmth. 23 In talking of

33 GOETHE
the drawings of Albrecht Dürer he apologises for the fact that his criticism “is nothing but a web of praise,“ by saying that it “will be long before either he or his readers will again meet with such a justification for praise.“ 24 Once more he takes the pilgrim's staff in hand, this time not in order to expatiate upon the “divine genius“ of Palladio in the city of lagoons, but in order, by visiting the cathedrals of Strasburg and Cologne, to fan into new flames the old fire of his youthful enthusiasm for German architecture. 25 He finds himself, as he tells us, quite at home again in the surroundings of early years, and truly rejoices in “the youthful pamphlet in which he had undertaken to utter the unutterable.“ 26 Above all he never lost his interest in that “projected world's wonder,“ Cologne Cathedral. With the help of etchings, plans, and pictures, the living work arose before his eyes as it would one day be, and over and over again he cast his weighty vote in favour of the completion of a building which he now judged to be “the most excellent and noblest work that perhaps ever was built upon earth with a consistent appreciation of art.“ 27
    Heaven forbid that we should see in this fickleness, as some commentators do, the influence of aesthetic theories. They are beside the question. The real foundation of the inconsistency lies in the domination of the momentary impression made upon an individual endowed with an unusually sensitive eye. It is with this sensitiveness that one whole side of Goethe's intellect is connected, and it is of this that he himself says, “with my character and my habit of thought a new opinion has always swallowed up and pushed aside those that had preceded it“ (D.W. 15). In art as well as in all subjects to which Goethe directed his attention, if we compare all his sayings, we shall find an almost superhuman honesty of judgment which proceeds from the clearness of his vision. On the other hand, in almost every utterance of his, taken by

34 GOETHE
itself, the careful reader will see how passionate admiration of one thing goes hand in hand with detestation of its rivals, even in his later days, when he had long since become a master of the art of self-control and of concealment of his inmost being.
    Without going into detail we have now examined this question fairly at length, and that must suffice for the present. At most I should like to add, for fear of any misunderstanding, that when I speak of “the eye“ alone, I include the whole sensitive faculty. The ridiculous tale of an unmusical Goethe, the invention of certain none too gifted philologists, is contradicted by hundreds of the most profound observations upon the essence of music in Goethe's writings: it is refuted by his friendship with Zelter, and by the living interest which during thirty years he took in the musical work of that friend, and in his labours on behalf of the furtherance of music: it is refuted by his intercourse with musicians at all times, but above all by his noble poem on “the divine value of sound,“ and by the admission that the “gigantic power of music unfolds his heart as a clenched fist is unfolded in friendship,“ 28 and when, fifty years before Richard Wagner, this Prince among poets lays down the doctrine, flouted by the whole brood of aesthetic pygmies, “Music is the true element from which all poetry springs and to which it flows back,“ this one utterance absolves us from the obligation of going into any further detail. 29 There is one more dictum only which I should like to mention, because as it first appeared in the Weimar edition it has not yet been turned to account; it settles the question of Goethe's estimate of music once for all. “If language were not incontestably the highest gift that we possess, I should place music even above language and on the highest pinnacle of all.“ 30
    Let us now turn to Kant, that brother sage, who, as we have seen, exercised such a strong power of attraction

35 GOETHE
over Goethe. It is hardly possible to imagine a greater contrast.
    Should you be unacquainted with the chronological details a few words will suffice to fill in the gap. Kant's life moves in a perfectly straight line, which no event either objective or subjective ever diverts even for a moment from the direction once laid down. He was born at Königsberg, brought up in the local gymnasium, as a student took up mathematics and philosophy for his special work, 31 became a private tutor, then “magister,“ then Professor, at the age of twenty-one he wrote his first work, in which we find these remarkable words: “I have already laid down the path which I mean to follow: I shall set out upon my course, and nothing shall prevent me from following it up,“ 32 he then travelled straight along this prescribed road for more than half a century without losing even a single day; for he never obeyed the calls to other universities, nor even left Königsberg for a single day, not even for the shortest pleasure trip. In this way he remained at work undisturbed “thinking himself out,“ until his intellectual faculties were extinguished.
    You see then that the course of Kant's life, — the outer life of the man as well as the inner life of the thinker, — was one of unexampled simplicity. You have but to consider the fate of a Democritus, a Socrates, an Abélard, a Giordano Bruno, a Descartes, a Leibniz in order to see that perhaps no philosopher ever to the same degree and in the same way lived altogether, solely, and undisturbedly for thinking.
    So far as Kant's intellectual personality is concerned this cursory consideration will help us to draw with infallible accuracy certain conclusions as a foundation upon which to build a living understanding of his philosophy. This homely existence, ordered with iron tenacity, points to a life of thought the features of which are

36 GOETHE
broad, simple, and consistent. The ruling power is a strong, rugged, passionless will, or perhaps we should rather say a will which inexorably fights down all those inborn passions of which there is no lack of evidence, forcing them into the channels which he chooses; and this rigidly determined scheme of life helps us to expect with certainty that we shall come in contact with an order of thought strictly and arbitrarily planned, manifestly organised upon a few leading principles. Beyond all this Kant's whole life bears witness to a necessity for thinking abnormally predominant over the necessity for seeing. As a matter of fact it is in this respect that Kant represents the exact antipodes to Goethe.
    We may say of Kant that from his youth up he forcibly closed his eyes and ears, — the whole machinery of the senses. In spite of all inducements he never went further from Königsberg than a neighbouring property, and even that he could not put up with for long, because all change of surroundings disturbed his thoughts: only in the height of summer he would sometimes spend a couple of days in a forester's house, where in the whispering woods he wrote his bright and amusing Observations on the feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime; but this is the utmost limit to which he went in any sympathy with the charms of landscape scenery, and in any inclination towards becoming intimate by travel with the features of our good mother earth. There is an old German proverb which says, “Knowledge must be wandered into.“ For Kant that had no meaning. To one of his friends he writes, “All change frightens me, and I think it my duty to bear in mind this instinct of my nature“ (Letters, 1, 214). Nor was he in any way attracted by towns where the concentration of life brings out so much that is new in social, commercial, scientific, and artistic relations. That the contemplation of a fine building, the sight of a painting or a statue by the hand of genius, the

37 GOETHE
listening to the living performance of a love-poem should belong to those experiences which like a flash of lightning reveal the higher sense of being, setting free the individual out of that most cramping of all bonds — routine, throwing us in tears of admiration upon the bosom of long-departed souls, urging us to deeds which we dream that we can accomplish at once, but which our grandchildren's children will hardly live to see: of all this Kant knows nothing, or if he knows aught of it, he resolutely holds himself aloof from it. The craving to hear and to see, the longing of a soul hungering for a noble joy of sensation, is something in which he has no part. The reading of a few Latin and German poets whose verses he has stamped upon his memory in great numbers, suffices his modest need of artistic impressions. His dwelling is entirely without ornament; he has no aesthetic needs of any sort, except indeed a taste for good and elegant clothes, and even that may be ascribed to consideration for other people; of pictures he declares that they are only hung out of vanity: with the one exception of a portrait of Rousseau, his walls must remain bare. But this refusal to see goes still further. As a devotee of natural science he has the opportunity of becoming curator of a natural-history museum, and that too at a moment when every dollar must have been an object to him; we know what an important part of his life's energy Goethe devoted to the formation and extension of all manner of collections: Kant was not long in resigning his post, which to him seemed an objectless occupation, preferring to live in penury so long as he could give up his life to his thinking, rather than spend his time and waste his energy in the study of a host of specimens. In the same way he occupied himself during his whole life with physics — confining himself absolutely to the mathematical side of the science and neglecting the experimental side, — and interested him-

38 GOETHE
self passionately in chemistry without ever having seen a test-glass or a retort.
    If all these had been the peculiarities of a commonplace person they would not be worthy of attention: dull, soulless people, are all round us, and learned men whose optic nerves only react upon printers' types, and have never in their lives seen anything but blackened paper, are plentiful enough. The only interesting point is the fact that Kant was naturally gifted with extraordinary keen organs of sense, and an almost fabulous power of observation bound up with an equally astonishing gift of imagination. Kant's eye was large, beautiful, and clear: his contemporaries were never weary of praising its magic fascination; to the last he could read the smallest print. His hearing was so extraordinarily sharp that even a distant rustling disturbed him. A physician bears like testimony as to his sense of smell. And like his senses, so also his imagination was of absolutely incomparable plasticity and exactness. The most interesting of the contemporary biographers of the Königsberg thinker, Jachmann, lays great stress upon this, and brings forward many instances in support of what he says. On one occasion, for instance, the presence of a Londoner at a party led to an allusion to Westminster Bridge, when Kant supplemented the Englishman's deficiency in observation and power of description with an exact account of the structure, the dimensions and style of which were so familiar to him, that the listeners took him for an Englishman and an architect! 33 We are told the same about his minute knowledge of Italy. Goethe's longing for “das Land wo die Citronen blühn“ was foreign to Kant's nature; yet people who knew what they were talking about could hardly be persuaded that he had not lived there for years, so precise was his knowledge of every detail of the country and its cities. 34 We have plenty of further evidence to the same purport.

39 GOETHE
What Vasianski also tells us of his political insight, points to a rare power of perception: he was far quicker than Goethe in seeing through the characters and gifts of the chief personages in the great drama at the end of the eighteenth century, so that as Vasianski says, “people thought that they were listening to the talk of a diplomatist versed in the secrets of the cabinets.“ Even more astounding, because their correctness was more quickly proved, were Kant's military and strategical forecasts as to the revolutionary wars; it was a time when his intellectual powers were already rapidly fading, indeed, he was beginning to lose the command of words; yet the exact plastic conception of the geographical condition of the European countries remained actively alive in him. The study of geography and anthropology had from all time been his favourite occupation. His lectures upon these subjects were so fascinating that his lecture-room could hardly hold the crowds of his audiences, for besides the students there were many savants and men of the world who were in the habit of attending them. To quote the words of a contemporary, “in these lectures Kant was all things to all men, and it was perhaps in them that he gained the most useful and powerful influence over the men of his time.“ The older he grew the more exclusively, says Jachmann, “did he refresh his mind after his philosophical flights by reading about natural objects and phenomena.“ One of his colleagues says, “mathematics and physics, including chemistry, were the subjects from which Kant preferred to furnish his library.“ Another says, “he read enormously, especially works on physics, history, and anthropology, but most of all books of travel.“ A third tells us, “he seldom read philosophical books, not even those which were for or against him.“ 35 Kant, indeed, and this may be a comfort to some of us, when he had finished working up his own brilliant system of philosophy, became more and

40 GOETHE
more unable to make himself at home in the thought world of the scholastic philosophers: the most he was able to do was energetically to repudiate Fichte's Wissenschaftslehre, not because of any interest which he found in the book in itself, but simply because Fichte professed that it was based on his own (Kant's) doctrine. Natural science and geographical discovery remained his favourite study, and Jachmann assures us that “there is certainly no available book of travels which Kant has not read and graven in his memory.“ Kant's refined and mathematically correct conception of the special characters of the different European nationalities, needs no further proof than the fourth section of his Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. I doubt, for instance, whether the Frenchman has ever been so sharply and so exactly analysed as he has been by this man who perhaps never in all his life set eyes upon a Frenchman. This is nothing but the power of perception. All this, — and I pass by many of the most striking examples for fear of wearying you — shows us a man who does not spend his days in puzzling out abstract ideas, but who carries in his brain a world of riches, a world which he perceives in its real shape, though with his eyes he has never beheld it; a man who peoples every country with those beings, human and others, which are peculiar to it, and can represent cities as if he had been present at their building. When such a natural scientist as Karl Gottfried Hagen, the author of the Principles of Chemistry, tells us of his speechless astonishment when he found Kant versed in all the details of experimental chemistry, although he had never in his life witnessed an experiment, we are bound to admit that Kant possessed an unheard-of power of conception with the most accurate faculty of apprehension. For chemistry is a science founded on perception, possessing no mathematical framework like physics, which therefore except by practical work in

41 GOETHE
the laboratory seems to afford nothing which memory can lay hold of.
    What then is it that distinguishes Kant's marvellous power of conception from that of Goethe?
    Kant's power of perception is, as it were, the converse of that of Goethe. Of general impressions as conveyed by the eye, of what is called intuition, he is almost unreceptive; but, on the other hand, when out of its various parts he can see a Whole arise, then his intellectual eye perceives it and holds it fast, and he is able at any time to take it to pieces or put it together as in the cases of Westminster Bridge, of a chemical combination, of the French national character. This characteristic of his intellect, which you may see here at work as it were superficially, penetrates the deepest depths of his philosophical method of thought. Thus, for example, in one of his searching metaphysical discussions, Kant writes, “We can only understand that which is our own work,“ and further, “we cannot perceive the combination of parts as ready-made to our hands, we have to make it for ourselves; we must combine if we are to conceive anything as combined, even space and time“ (Letters, 2, 496). But according to Kant “all phenomena are looked upon as aggregates or masses of given parts,“ that is to say as combinations (Reine Vernunft, 204), and consequently to him every perception represents something made, a “combination.“
    Although a man like Kant is naturally large-minded enough to be accessible to broad general impressions which are incapable of analysis, we yet see that he is not at his ease in such conditions: thus, for example, he says of the sight of the star-studded heaven: “it gives us undeveloped ideas which may perhaps be felt, but which do not admit of description“ (Natural History and Theory of Heaven, conclusion): clearly even in this case, and even if he has to admit that the ideas are “undeveloped,“ he

42 GOETHE
is still under the impression of ideas and of ideas in great numbers, for he needs parts in order to convert them into a whole. This is the exact contradiction of the postulate which Goethe sets up in his first conversation with Schiller, “that nature must be portrayed by working from the whole to the parts.“ 36 Here you have in contrast two diametrically opposed methods of perception. But it will not be until we reach a further stage in our lectures that we shall be able to trace to its roots what it is that in this connection differentiates the two men. Let us for the present content ourselves with this first simple observation, and say, Kant is no artist, his eye is not receptive and therefore not creative. In his case it would be impossible to say that the optic nerve penetrated the brain from the retina, but we should rather say that the brain projected itself into the retina: for with him seeing is a true analytical function of the brain. While Goethe can say of himself, “the sense of sight is the sense by means of which I am best enabled to grasp the outer world,“ 37 Kant is compelled to confess, “I only see what I think.“ That is why seeing is such a strain upon him, and why he prefers to see, and sees better and even more sharply, when his eyes are closed. Great analytical keenness combined with a limited imagination is the necessary result of this physical disposition; for imagination does not spring out of our own human self, but its material is drawn from the outside world as from a fountain. The essential organ of all creative artists is the eye, — the eye which has no concern with ideas whether developed or undeveloped, but, as female principle, accepts lovingly and without question whatever the impression of the senses as male principle is pleased to bestow upon it: the analytical power of thought with its creation of new combinations is a secondary consideration. Thus we see how an eminently artistic intellect like that of Goethe differs essentially

43 GOETHE
from that of Kant in its way of setting to work in order to arrive at any general philosophical conclusion. Goethe gives utterance to this as plainly as possible when he confesses, “I am completely puzzled when I make any attempt at comparing things side by side.“ It is not in his power like Kant to combine them into a whole, but on the contrary he has to see the whole in order to be able to understand the parts with all their peculiar properties as parts. “My manner of looking upon and dealing with natural objects, is to start with an impression of the whole in order to arrive at an observation of the parts“; that is what Goethe says of himself; 38 and, therefore, in order to understand nature, he is compelled, — compelled by the peculiarity of his intellectual faculties, — to proceed as Seer and Poet, that is to say to create by means of perception.
    We are now able to see in all clearness the contrast between the intellectual faculties of these two personalities. The one, Goethe, lives with his eye ever open and only arrives at thought by means of perception; the other, Kant, lives with his eyes closed and it is only by thought that he arrives at seeing. Still, I must issue a warning against attaching too great weight to any such formula: it serves no purpose beyond defining our momentary position. It is no more than a first comparison, a first picture, something like the distant view of a mountain-range on the horizon. We have to draw nearer; however much we may be lacking in science, we cannot afford to be superficial; and for that reason we must not hurry over the reciprocal relation between perception and thought. If the intellectual personality of Goethe is to lead us to a knowledge of that of Kant, we must in the first place become acquainted with it. And yet who can boast that he knows Goethe, the man who surveyed all nature? Up to the present there are but few who know him.

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    Perhaps it will be Kant himself, the incomparable analyst of the human intellect, who will give us a clue to put us on the right way. Towards the end of the introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason, we read, “There are two branches of human knowledge, which perhaps spring from one common root unknown to us, namely sensibility and understanding, the first of which furnishes us with subjects which the second enables us to think.“ This saying deserves lasting attention, it is as it were a first step in metaphysical thought. Still, it would be a very superficial verdict if we were rashly to make the assertion that in Goethe one of the two branches, sensibility, was highly developed to the prejudice of the other, while the converse took place in Kant. In Goethe's observations of nature it is precisely the understanding that is so extraordinarily prominent; hardly any other man has to the same degree enriched natural science with ideas, as contrasted with discoveries. As a matter of fact the relationship between the two “branches“ is extremely complex. The two, sensibility and understanding, are as necessary to perception as they are to thought. And the degree to which both play their part in the same individual — on the one hand in perception and on the other in the thinking out of the subject perceived, — is a chief cause of the difference in the intellectual qualities of various personalities. The meaning of this can only be made clear by a concrete example, and so I shall venture to insert here an excursus on Goethe's doctrine of metamorphosis. In this way we shall search out the inmost depths of those intellectual qualities of which we have up to the present only been touching the fringe. The direct relation to Kant, of which you already have some conjecture, will then at once unveil itself before your eyes.
    All the world is familiar with Goethe's account of his first important meeting with Schiller. Goethe, still in

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the innocence of his heart, unconsciously making use of his own methods, lays before Schiller his doctrine of the metamorphosis of plants, and with a few strokes of his pencil produces a sketch of his Urpflanze, the primeval plant. Schiller listens attentively, but then shakes his head and says, “That is no experience, that is an idea.“ Goethe, nettled, replies, “Well! I am glad that I have got ideas, without knowing it, and that I see them with my eyes.“ Something seen with the eye: that is precisely the meaning of the Greek word Idea. Plato's ideas spring from such an intense craving for perception, that to him every single object is in his eyes a mere shadow. It is quite possible to possess an idea, without being conscious of it as a reasoning process; that, as we shall see in a later lecture, is what is continually happening to us all. But what we have chiefly to bear in mind here is the impossibility under which the perceptive genius labours of distinguishing between his ideas and his experiences, until the analytical thinker has cleared matters up for him. Until Goethe's meeting with Schiller the transformation of one leaf-form into another, or the change of vertebrae into a skull, was something quite as concretely “perceived,“ and consequently “experienced,“ as the single plants and the single bones which he had studied.
    Here we have at last arrived at the contradiction which has been so often alluded to in the precise form which is exactly suited to our investigation, namely the contradiction between experience and idea. The open eye like the closed eye was the mere physical symptom of an intellectual tendency: the contrast between sensibility and understanding would have led us to a purely metaphysical discussion of the human intellect in general; a distinction between perception and thinking remains theoretical unless an appreciation of the practical difference between idea and Experience has led the way. 39 Here then we

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must bring our auger into play. We are all the more bound to do so inasmuch as this question of the relation between idea and experience, — expressed with such striking terseness in that conversation between Schiller and Goethe — is continually recurring when we speak of seeing, and will therefore often occupy us in these lectures, where the different way in which the world appeals to different personalities will claim our chief interest. For this relation between idea and experience forms an axis, round which our conception of what is in general meant by “perception“ revolves. The great Goethe himself from the year 1794 was incessantly occupied with this problem. He recognised clearly that it is “as mischievous exclusively to obey experience, as it is unconditionally to follow the idea.“ 40 Unremittingly he turned the question round and round, hoping to find a solution of the riddle. He perceived that the contradiction between idea and experience corresponded analogously to that between sensibility and understanding, between seeing and thinking, between analysis and synthesis, even in a certain sense between physics and metaphysics, between object and subject, between phenomenon and reality.
    Reflection invariably shows that in each case these twin contradictions are rooted the one in the other; practice proves everywhere that the inclination of the one is to destroy the other. Like negative and positive electricity, they mutually attract and repel one another. If we follow Goethe's thoughts upon nature — a matter of far greater intellectual import than the barren chewing of the cud of Faust and Tasso, and which has only become satisfactorily possible by the splendid second part of the Weimar edition — we shall see this question continually cropping up. In the treatise on Colour he writes: “Here it is that the practical man in experience, and the thinker in speculation, tires himself out, and a contest arises for which there is no peaceable or decisive conclusion.“ 41

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Against the presumptuous narrow-minded attempts of the so-called “practician,“ Goethe is ever ready to break a lance on behalf of the rights of the Thinker, that is to say, of the rights of the understanding, of the idea, of synthesis, indeed even of metaphysics. If this statement should seem startling to men who have been brought up in the tradition of an unphilosophical as well as of an unmusical Goethe, I am in a position to quote his own words: “But here we shall above all confess and declare that it is in full consciousness that we find ourselves in the region where the metaphysics and natural history overlap, where the serious and trusty investigator loves to linger“ (W.A. 2, 6—348). Pray note this expression, “loves to linger.“ And yet his own conception of nature and of life is too manifestly rooted in perception; he is a too objective thinker, and above all the eye, which reveals phenomena to him, is too completely the ruling organ in his personality for him ever, even momentarily, to be inclined to be false to the material world of empiricism. Wordsworth's famous lines:
To the solid ground
Of nature trusts the mind which builds for aye,
might have been coined for Goethe, with the characteristically limiting addition that Goethe only finds “solid ground“ where there is something for the eye to see, whereas he feels mistrust and even repulsion for everything which the Physicists have to say about an invisible nature. When the philosophical botanist, Link, tries to confirm certain ideas of Goethe's on the growth of plants by bringing into comparison movements of the pendulum and of waves, so far from being flattered, the scientific poet resents this “introduction of modern, indeterminate, sublimated abstraction,“ 42 and in writing to Schiller about the result to which his “observations of nature“ lead, he says: “It becomes, in fact, the world of the eye,

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and all reasoning resolves itself into a sort of theatrical performance“ (15, 11, 96).
    Pray remember this expression, underlined by Goethe himself, the world of the eye. The importance of it you will only learn by degrees in the subsequent lectures. For the present let us content ourselves with one remark; it is the world of the eye whose law leads Goethe unconsciously to bind the innumerable units of experience into a few ideal entities; as the flower needs the sun, so does this philosophy expand under the bright rays of illuminating ideas. But ideas do not originate in mere empirical experience, but in reason; and so perhaps you may begin to suspect that Goethe's way and Kant's way, though they may seem to diverge here, are bound to meet again in the end.
    Do not let us undertake more for the present than we can hope to accomplish to-day. My first principle in these lectures is to keep you from all abstract thought; that is tabu. Indeed, as a general principle I would warn you against all straining of thought; nothing is more hindering to the understanding. Goethe hits the mark when he says, “Thinking does not help thought.“ What we call our special thoughts are a gift of nature; there is no acceptation of the thoughts of others without a patient, open surrender of self. Besides this, I shall avoid attempting to lead you into the field of pure thought, until we shall have gained a perfectly clear conception the material for which can only be gathered together step by step.
    Let us go back to the conversation between Schiller and Goethe. There could be no better theme upon which to build.
    Schiller shakes his head and says, “That is not experience, that is an idea.“ For simplicity's sake I just now agreed with him, as so often happens. Yet, if he was not altogether wrong, he was certainly not altogether

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right. The matter is not so simple as all that. Goethe was far rather justified in “feeling annoyed“ and obstinately holding to his point. He and Schiller had quite unconsciously seized upon the question of metamorphosis at the very point where idea and experience imperceptibly overlap, that is to say at the metamorphosis of the plant leaf. It will not take long to explain the meaning of this assertion.
    The Greek word morphe signifies form or shape, and metamorphosis means change of form. It is a misfortune for the scientific use of the word that Ovid's metamorphoses have given it an ineradicable mythological ring. The poet begins: “I am about to sing of forms changed into new bodies,“ and so we learn how Actaeon was changed into a stag, Narcissus into a flower, Atlas into a mountain — all metamorphoses, with many more beautiful symbolical legends by which nature is pressed into the service of human imagination. In the case of the poet we know exactly what he means by “metamorphosis“; but we can defy any man to give a clear definition of the word when it is applied to natural science. Sometimes it stands for a demonstrable historic change of one thing into another, just as it does in Ovid's forms; sometimes we apply the word to the different phases of development of some individual living being which changes its shape; sometimes it means an hypothetical or even purely ideal return of different forms to a more or less conceivable, sometimes altogether inconceivable, primitive type, in which some see an actual historical ancestor, while others see no more than the necessary conception of the human intellect working out a system of order in a monstrous chaos of material. Goethe himself, who was so little capable of sifting the difference between experience and idea, has never declared clearly which of these several meanings he wishes us to assign to metamorphosis and the transmutation of organic forms;

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it is doubtful whether he himself has any certain ideas upon the subject. Here, again, it must not be words or definitions, but concrete notions, that must guide your thoughts.
    If you wish to obtain an antidote against the mystical and poetical conceptions of the word metamorphosis, and yet at the same time to preserve its concrete application by the Roman poet, you can find a solution of the difficulty in the language of modern geologists. The term metamorphic is applied to rocks which, in consequence of physical influences, such as heat, pressure, steam, and the like, have undergone a chemical and structural transformation. It is certain, for example, that all the mica schists and varieties of gneiss were originally deposits like the lime and chalk formations and the sandstones; probably they were rich in organic remains: but there came a time when by lasting or short, but enormously powerful, influences, they were altered through and through, the component parts were set free or fused, — what petrifactions they contained were destroyed, — so that a unified crystalline rock took the place of stratifications with their rich variety of deposits. The chemical composition, no less than the physical quality of this new rock, is absolutely different from what it was before. Here we have a completely concrete, material metamorphosis; one thing has been made into another, and this is pure experience, not idea, — or rather let us say that there is only one thing in it which is idea, namely, the idea by which we recognise the new rock as being the same as the old, and therefore assert that it has undergone “metamorphosis,“ although in fact the former rock has ceased to exist, but has made place for an entirely new one.
    The moment we take organic nature into consideration the matter becomes more complicated. Think, in the first place, of the most familiar example, the butterfly.

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The caterpillar creeps out of the egg; after a while the caterpillar imprisons itself in a cocoon or capsule; an entirely new creature comes into being, the pupa or chrysalis, in which all the inner and outer organs undergo a far-reaching transformation. The conditions of life in this new inert being are so remarkable, that many pupae may be preserved for years, — under the influence of cold for instance, — without prejudice to life; at last the capsule is thrown off, and what was once a worm dragging its loathsome body painfully from one flower-stalk to another, issues forth in the shape of the brilliant butterfly flitting from flower to flower on airy wings.
    This metamorphosis of the butterfly, — a phenomenon of frequent occurrence in the vegetable and animal kingdoms, Goethe called “the successive, obvious metamorphosis.“ Although we must admit with awe that here we meet one of nature's inscrutable marvels, we unhesitatingly claim this species of metamorphosis as a simple “experience.“ As a matter of fact, there is doubtless a great deal of “idea“ in our interpretation of it: Goethe himself ended by suspecting as much; but it will be better for us to proceed further without philosophising, and bring out another example, which is also quite “obvious,“ but which, instead of exhibiting a successive metamorphosis — a succession of changes, — shows what Goethe calls by way of contradistinction “a simultaneous“ change.
    Here we have the skeleton of a cat. I want you to take no notice of the rest of the picture, but simply to fix your eyes upon the vertebral column from the skull to the tip of the tail.
    If you count the bones of the spine and of the tail you will find that they are forty-six in number, or forty-four,
if you should fail to observe that where they are attached to the pelvic bones, three have grown together into one single mass. 43 No one will hesitate for a moment to

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recognise every one of these forty-six bones as a vertebra. Even a savage would, I believe, understand and endorse the statement that we have here the same bone repeated forty-six times; at any rate, we know by experience that our children have no trouble in mastering this notion. The homogeneous conception of this chain of bones is brought home to us on all sides; we recognise the manifest conformity to certain leading features of the structure of the several members, their evident connection for the formation of one homogeneous mechanical bodily axis,
Skeleton of a cat
the proportional distribution of their physiological function as protectors of the spinal cord. And yet, if you look more closely into this chain of bones, this forty-sixfold repetition of one single form, you will see that no two of them are perfectly alike. We are in the habit of recognising the bones of the front and hind legs as analogous, but we are careful to distinguish between them and give them special names; yet they correspond far more nearly than the vertebral bones. Here are the first and last vertebrae of another cat's skeleton.
    Is there in this wide world anything more different? The one is a tiny, cylindrical, elongated little bone, with small club-shaped thickenings at each end, — the other

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is a powerful bone, vertically compressed, horizontally winged. And now with this first vertebra, the so-called Atlas or carrier, compare the second vertebra, which anatomists call the Epistropheus or the turner. It is extended lengthwise, compressed in breadth, furnished with a high dorsal ridge, which stretches beyond the other vertebrae both front and back. Here, again, is an entirely new form absolutely unlike the other two. And now that your eye has been sharpened, pray look once more at the spinal column as a whole; observe the
Vertebrae of a cat's skeleton
high spiny processes on the dorsal vertebrae, no two of which are exactly alike; observe how these thorn-shaped processes are suddenly pressed forwards, not backwards, in beak shape, whereas the vertebrae in the lumbar region exhibit more and more powerful processes directed diagonally downwards, with, as a new peculiarity, swellings which extend forwards and backwards on both sides.
    We need go into no further detail; we have gathered material enough to ask ourselves seriously by what right we include these bones, all differing from one another, in one idea which we call “vertebra.“ I say idea intentionally, because obviously there can be no homogeneous concep-

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Primary vertebraetion, no patently visible form in which this Atlas, this spiny dorsal vertebra, this smooth caudal bone, could be included, unless with the help of theoretical reflection we should think out a typical vertebra or ideal vertebra — as you may please to call it — the shadowy existence of which does not exist outside of our own brains. Even the development of the cat in the womb will not help us to the conception of a neutral vertebral form, as it were. For even if in the early life of the foetus there should be a stage when the so-called primary vertebrae lie the one behind the other in the shape of similar discs, what does this mean but that we are not able to detect the latent potential changes which will soon manifest themselves? 44 More than that, these so-called primary vertebrae are not even the parents of our vertebrae. It is rather muscles and ligaments that it is their function to produce; then along the whole length of the dorsal axis the so-called perichordal tube arises without any indication of divisions. Later a series of changes takes place, out of which at last the true vertebrae proceed, in such a manner, indeed, that every single true vertebra takes up fractions of two different primary segments, to which other forms again are added to complete the vertebra, — forms which in no wise touch or are in relation to one another, varying in different portions of the axis of the body.
    I think you will agree that in this conception of the vertebrae it was not experience alone that was at work, but also idea, and indeed idea playing a considerable part. You will probably feel some hesitation when you look at these forty-six different bones, and a Goethe

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teaches you that they are all evolutions of primary vertebrae which were once uniform and entirely alike, and therefore to be conceived as originally related to one another, just as the butterfly is related to the chrysalis and the caterpillar; — that the vertebral chain of bones is an example of “synchronic transformation,“ — of simultaneous metamorphosis. You will probably be inclined to shake your heads and say with Schiller, that is rather idea than experience. The ''transformation“ of something which only, or perhaps even hardly, exists in my imagination and only floats before me as a symbolical type, may be a useful thought, but it is surely a bold one. You must however consider further that this thought is no mere abstraction, but an “idea“ in the sense of Plato to which I have alluded above. We are dealing with the perception of what is seen as a combined whole, with what the famous Greek philosopher called a synagoge. It is as if these many vertebrae laid a burthen upon our power of conception, as if they disturbed the eye and did not allow it to attain that power of sight which “rests quietly and purely upon objects.“ 45 Goethe himself, who “strove to compass the organic world with passionate senses,“ 46 suffered much under the plethora of forms, and from the consequent impossibility of taking them all in. His whole rich work in the fields of botany and zoology is directed to one single endeavour which we may sum up in the words, he wished to make visible to others what he himself had seen. Kant, as you will remember, closed his eyes before the multitude of phenomena, whereas Goethe came to the assistance of the eye, and simplified the image by condensing that multitude into a few ideas. What we look upon as theoretical in him, and what has therefore alienated the poet from so many of us, is all in the interest of the comprehension of that “world of the eye.“ Even his optics cannot be understood until we realise that the work is no less than

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a heroic attack against invisible, arithmetical schemes on behalf of conceptions capable of being perceived. This “simultaneous“ metamorphosis cannot then by any possibility in his case be a mere idea, but is on the contrary, if I may say so, experience and something more. 47
    The contrast between a metamorphosis which is consecutive and almost entirely empirical, and a metamorphosis which is simultaneous and almost ideal, will have given you some definite notions as to the relation between experience and idea within the scope of this range of thought; and now at last you can understand to what extent the so-called “metamorphosis of plants“ stands precisely upon that critical point where experience and idea overlap one another, so that it is impossible to draw a boundary-line. The metamorphosis of plants is, indeed, at the same time “successive“ and “simultaneous“ — consecutive and synchronous! Both conceptions are permissible; the question of which we should choose depends upon the point to which we turn our attention, and that is why we can hardly avoid here the interchange between experience and idea. That Goethe at this point, where the problem, as it were, slips through our fingers, began his comparative studies, is less a matter of accident than of instinct: for it was precisely the wavering standpoint between experience and idea that was calculated to furnish him with the right impetus for the attainment of what he wanted for his “world of the eye.“
    Here you have several plants picked at haphazard in the fields this morning. Although Goethe's interest was first excited by the sight of the Fanpalms in the Botanical Gardens at Padua, it is characteristic of his doctrine of the metamorphosis of plants that he did not keep in view trees or that branch of the vegetable kingdom which is richest in forms — the cryptogams or non-flowering plants, but first and foremost directed his

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attention to those herbs which come quickly into growth and bloom and as quickly die. 48 What gives this a special importance is the fact that Goethe's doctrine rests in no way upon scientific analysis, but exclusively upon perception. A peculiar amalgamation of the ideas
Ranunculus auricomus
Ranunculus auricomus

of rest and motion, of “being“ and “coming into being,“ here takes possession of what he actually saw, transforming the phenomena of inscrutable nature into ideas better adapted to the comprehension of the human mind. This creation of Goethe's sometimes reminds one of the higher mathematics; there is the same violent bursting open of a closed door 49, — indeed, the analogy is quite

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complete, except for the fact that in the one case it is the realm of abstract perception, in the other that of concrete perception which is dealt with.
    If we look at these plants we shall see a creature complete from the root to the flower. It is just as finished, self-contained, and definitely inclosed within its own limits as our skeleton of the cat. The leaves, as you see, vary in form; the so-called cotyledons at the foot of the stalk are simple, not crenate or indented, whereas the others are crenate though in different degrees, the segments growing deeper at first from leaf to leaf, and then again decreasing.
    In these other plants you will never find two leaves exactly alike in shape: here, for instance, the lower leaves are fifty or a hundred times larger than the upper ones. There are other cases where the polymorphism of the leaves is even more pronounced. But you must look further, and consider the flower. We cannot help being struck by the leaf-nature of these single petals, which can moreover be proved by important anatomical evidence, and especially by their position in relation to the stem; and this holds good of the inner whorls, the stamens, and the organs of fructification, however much to the outer eye they may seem to differ from green leaves. All this is the gift of what Goethe calls “our guardian angel, the Genius of Analogy.“ 50 Of course, petals are not leaves any more than leaves are petals; their structure is in many particulars a different living organism, and this is even more true in the case of the sexual organs; and when Goethe says, “We know that the stem-leaves are only preparations and pre-indications of the flowers and reproductive organs,“ 51 I confess that such an exaggerated figure of speech seems to me to be most questionable. The stem-leaves are the most important nutritive organs of the plant; to describe them merely as “pre-indications“ of the petals, has no more sense

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than if I were to call the stomach a pre-indication of the brain. We see what this leads to when Goethe sets up the monstrous assertion, “The female part of the blossom is no more a special organ than the male“ 52; this brings us to a doctrine of final unity, and science is ruled out of court. Let us, however, for the moment accept the analogy and agree to refer all these organs
Anadendrum medium
Anadendrum medium

to the one idea of “leaf,“ reserving certain reflections for further consideration hereafter. This whole series of leaves stands before our eyes in the same way as the series of vertebrae in the cat's spine. We see them all before us, side by side, each fulfilling its special function. If we should look upon these forms as “transformations,“ we can only treat them, as in the case of the vertebral column, as a synchronous or “simultaneous metamorphosis,“ that is to say, as a pure idea, and Schiller is

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right when he says, “that is not an experience“; for even though the leaves are developed successively, no one leaf arises out of another, nor are green leaves changed into petals, as the butterfly is developed out of the pupa, but the transformation merely refers to one general idea in our brains, called leaf. That, however, was not the way in which Goethe, in the first instance at any rate, considered the matter — on the contrary, he practically starts with the conception of an analogy with the consecutive transformation of insects! Let me explain how that came about.
    When Goethe began to busy himself with such matters, the metamorphosis plantarum was a pet phrase and shibboleth of the investigators of nature of that day with their muddled generalisations. For example, in a dissertation which Linnaeus himself, though not its author, sent to the press in 1755 under the above title, we read, “The green caterpillar-skin of the plant bursts: but together with the lacework of the calyx it remains hanging to the main body of the plant which continues to shed its skin ... the caterpillar-skin remains like the green bark of the stem, but the butterfly peeps out merrily and flaunts the gay colours of its petal wings.“ 53 Here we have a true pattern of false analogies which might commend itself to some modern Ovid, but would certainly not suit any investigator of natural history. Now Goethe stood under the influence of the Linnaean school: when he began to work at botany its works were his “daily study,“ and he has left us many direct and indirect proofs of that fact. The Philosophia Botanica of Linnaeus had taught him that under certain conditions of soil petals are changed into green leaves, and conversely green leaves into petals. Principium florum et foliorum idem est. Luxurians vegetatio folia e floribus continuando producit, etc. The whole of these and similar “facts“ are published by Linnaeus under

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the title of Metamorphosis Vegetabilis. 54 That is the origin of Goethe's use of the word metamorphosis, which was a misfortune, inasmuch as it led him and others astray; but it also accounts for the first incentive to an idea possessing such a penetrative power of observation, that Goethe was justified in saying that he saw his idea with his eyes. 55
    In order to understand this we must leave the standpoint of Rest, which we occupy so long as we remain in contemplation of these finished plants, in order to take up that of Motion. These annuals are all of quick growth: their whole vegetation only comprises a few months. That is why Goethe conducted most of his observations in this field in Italy, where it is possible to watch the breaking out of new leaves from day to day and their growth from hour to hour. “What in the North I only suspected, here (in Frascati) I find revealed“ (Letters, 3, 10, 87). Now, however, I must call your attention to this: the stem of these plants is a simple form of axis: it grows upwards, and as it grows so-called nodes or joints are formed at fairly regular intervals: at each node a leaf is produced: this process goes on without variation, and even where the leaves surround the stem in whorls, as they do here in the corolla of petals, a closer observation, and the evidence of frequent malformations, go to show that in this case we must accept the presence of greatly shortened internodes. We human beings who are the result of the polymorphism or great variety of form in the animal body, find such a striking uniformity in the plan of this vegetable structure, that we are at first inclined to notice nothing beyond the strict repetition of similarity, and it is not until later on that our attention is arrested by such differences as exist. Johannes Müller, the great physiologist, has remarked that it is not the recognition of reason, but imagination which detects in the plant “a manifold whole made up

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of identical members.“ 56 Goethe gave expression to the same idea in poetic form:
A driving consecutive force, raising itself, renewed,
Node towering on node, but always the same first form. *
    We see the simple stem, detect the simple law, in obedience to which on every node it bears a leaf, and look upon the leaf as an equally uniform entity, “always the same first form“: we start from the preconception of “identical members,“ and in our eyes it is always one stem carrying one leaf repeated indefinitely. That is what logicians call a “subreption,“ that is to say a fallacy arising out of impressions of the senses. Now imagine a man gifted with the most lively fancy, and an almost unbridled passionate nature, who under the sunny sky of Palermo and Naples watches the plants growing under his very eyes! Every morning he sees a new development in the same identic member, and every morning it assumes a new shape, differing from that of the day before; it grows in breadth, it grows in length, the outline varies with the many motions of the plant: suddenly, without any interval, the organ contracts itself into a small smooth-edged calyx leaf, spreads out once more into a coloured corolla, again shrivels into the almost dustlike anther, again widens out as it were with the force of a last breath of life into an ovary or seed-vessel, which the investigator breaks open to find the tiny germs of the future cotyledons of a new plant. For a man in such a frame of mind there is in all this no standstill, no rest; the motionless plant is to him a thing in motion, the form of a being undergoing a daily process of change; as for the leaf which is really firmly fixed, which, until the autumn sets it free, remains as unchanged as a crystal, Goethe sees in it “a very Proteus
* Gleich darauf ein folgender Trieb, sich erhebend, erneuet,
Knoten auf Knoten getürmt, immer das erste Gebild. 57
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which can show itself in all manner of shapes“; 58 he sees the metamorphosis taking place under his eyes; as a human bosom heaves and sinks, he sees the leaf spread itself out and contract, from cotyledon to fruit, and his ears ring with “the six footsteps of Nature.“ 59 In all this, as you see, he perceives motion and continuity. He ignores the fact that as in the vertebral column of the cat, so also in the plant the different parts are in close relation, absolutely autonomous, and moreover of unequal physiological value, — in his mind he is dealing with a true, consecutive metamorphosis, and just as the caterpillar is transformed into the butterfly, so in this case he sees the practical transformation of one thing into another thing. “It is no dream, no play of fancy,“ he assures Frau von Stein (Letters, 10, 7, 86).
    That is why Goethe, who thought that his eyes had witnessed the transformation of the leaf a thousand times, and upon whom, as he says, this perception had acted with the driving potency of passion, 60 was taken aback and nettled when Schiller, the man who seldom turned his eye to organic nature, critically and calmly met him with the observation, “that is no experience, that is idea.“ It was just in this conception of the metamorphosis of plants that Goethe imagined himself to have the most intensive “experience“: it was from this that he derived the excessive wealth of his power of observation: it was this that led him to the idea of metamorphosis in the rest of organic nature. At the beginning of his Italian journey we find him oppressed by the varied richness of plant forms: “I do not yet see how I am to disentangle myself,“ he writes from Padua. He lacked some intermediary organ which should enable him to take in, that is to say to experience, the whole field of life. “'What is perception without thought?“ he asks in the same letter, a question which we shall have to discuss very fully in our later lectures, but which already

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shows us what limitations we must set to ourselves before we accept the saying that Goethe was all eye as something to which a comprehensible and true meaning can be attached. There is no true perception without thought. A great seer must also be a great thinker. The special part which thinking, as organ of perception, must have played in Goethe is clear from his own admission, “no true keenness of sight: hence the gift of seeing the charm of things,“ 61 and from the other saying, “sight itself is thought.“ 62 We shall see clearly that as a matter of fact Goethe's sight was not keen, when in the next lecture we compare him with Leonardo da Vinci. 63 Kaspar Friedrich Wolff was an example of keen sight, when armed with his dissecting knife and microscope he laid the foundations for the comparative anatomy of plants. Wolff showed that we have no right to speak of the origin of the parts of a living being until we have learnt to distinguish