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 between the three following things: histological elementary structures, tissues in their varieties, and organs. 64 Next he observed the practical history of the birth of the stem and its side-organs; he discovered the point of vegetation, followed the genesis of the vascular system out of cells the walls of which are reabsorbed, studied the growth of the leaf, etc., and upon the basis of all these observations he came to the conclusion that all the parts of the plant might be referred either to stem or leaf. 65 Wolff made many mistakes, yet his method was that of strict empirical natural science. Goethe did nothing like that: he was not fitted for work of that kind; a few weeks after he had uttered his cry of despair at Padua, “how am I to disentangle myself? What is seeing without thinking?“ he wrote on a scrap of paper, “Hypothesis: everything is leaf; and it is this simplicity which renders possible the greatest complexity.“ 66 He now at last saw that he had removed the cataract from his inward eye; thinking and
Goethe in 1819

GOETHE IN 1819
From the painting by Georg Dawe at the Goethe Museum at Weimar
Photo. Louis Held, Weimar

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perception were in harmony, and in this way experience streamed into both his inward and his outward eye; the whole world stood revealed to his gaze. From Naples he writes to Herder that he now has at his command, not only all plants that exist, but even those that do not exist, but possibly might exist, and he exclaims with intoxication, “Nature herself must envy me.“ 67 And now comes Schiller, the scholar and thinker, and, so far from envying him, shakes his head!
    I may hope that my short exposition may have sufficed to make you at one and the same time intoxicated with Goethe and critical with Schiller, for such a frame of mind alone can give rise to an exact conception of the importance of Goethe's true doctrine of metamorphosis, and, as a result of that conception of his method of perception, to an appreciation of the relation between experience and idea as it presented itself to his mind.
    You will have remarked in what a peculiar fashion in his conception of the metamorphosis of plants the ideas of motion and rest, of simultaneity and sequence, of unity and plurality are so to speak superposed the one upon the other. In the insect world this does not take place, or to speak more exactly it does not take place in any striking fashion, for in the case of insects the one develops itself out of the other in course of time — even in the vertebral column it only takes place out of sight, for there from the outset the one is immovably attached to the other. In the plant on the other hand we see a living being not only growing, but daily producing new organs which had not previously existed. In this case therefore interchange of conceptions of simultaneous cohesion and of successive sequence became possible. The conception of simultaneous metamorphosis, in its broader sense, is the foundation of all comparative anatomy, and the conception of successive metamorphosis commonly observed in the lives of insects and of many

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other animals, is in the same way the foundation of every hypothesis of evolution, — and by the combination of these two conceptions we are able to develop a new idea: that idea it is that Goethe brings forward under the title of “metamorphosis of plants.“ He then goes on to apply this idea drawn from plant life to organic nature as a whole, although he is never able to put the case so clearly as in plants, for reasons which you now understand. Nevertheless a closer investigation will convince you that in Goethe's doctrine the amalgamation of the conceptions of simultaneity and sequence is really to be found everywhere. “The origin of the skull out of the vertebrae was revealed to me,“ writes Goethe, but after all what does that mean? Goethe is not talking of “analogy,“ but of “origin.“ We may, however, with full certainty assert that the existence of a chorda dorsalis and of a vertebral column, presupposes a brain and a skull; in an organism the various parts reciprocally condition one another; it is not out of a transformation of the tail that the head comes into existence. Of origin, therefore, in the true meaning of the word as implying sequence, there can be no question. On the other hand “simultaneous origin“ conveys no conceivable idea. The skull cannot trace its existence to vertebrae which are vertebrae, and so it becomes necessary to substitute the word were, for which, however, I should be unable to find the slightest justification either in the development of the individual or in any admitted derivation from other forms, since every progressive differentiation of the vertebrae, could only go hand in hand with an exactly corresponding higher development of the brain vesicles and of the skull which envelops them. Here we have a crux, and Goethe himself admits, “we keep wandering round and round in the field of the incomprehensible and unspeakable.“ 68
    This holds good of his own idea of metamorphosis. No

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scientific fact, no philosophic observation, is expressed by it; and yet in spite of this it possesses an imperishable value, for the reason that it moves on the mathematically correct boundary-line between experience and idea, between analysis and synthesis. We men are not only endowed with two eyes side by side, we have also two eyes behind one another; but it rarely happens that the visual axes of these two pairs of eyes exactly correspond, so that the ray that comes from without falls through the outer eye upon the inner eye in such a manner as to put reason in direct communication with the empirical world. It is only when the two halves of our nature meet exactly upon the boundary-line that it takes place, and that only with the swiftness of lightning, where as soon as the one or the other eye, the inner or the outer, wishes more exactly to fix the image seen, it at once moves in the corresponding direction. Whoso, then, like Goethe, makes the annual plants the starting-point of his comparative observations of organic beings, has the advantage of having directed his gaze right through from without to within and from within to without, by which he will have been taught to attempt the same method elsewhere. This is why Goethe, later on in 1820, in his investigations into the formation and transformation of organic natures, tells us that “the method which he followed in his botanical studies had always served as a trusty guide.“ 69 For in these days of a barbarous empiricism it can never be often enough repeated that a reciprocal amalgamation of the ideas of unity and plurality, sequence and simultaneity, occurs in reality everywhere and without exception in all our comparative observations of organic forms; they are made up of idea and experience in combination: to ignore that is either to founder with the admirable, but in philosophy poorly equipped, Darwin deeper and deeper into the marsh of empiricism, or to soar upon a winged Rosinante with that Don Quixote

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of modern science, the fantastic Ernst Haeckel, into the region of the densest mountain mists, where he looks upon his own wraith in the light of a new revelation.
    Here we see what Goethe owed to Schiller. Goethe has told us later with what “unconscious simplicity“ he was wont to philosophise until Schiller and Kant enlightened him. 70 He was deep in aimless struggles over the Urpflanze (the primitive plant) and the Urtier (primitive animal): his standard for the significance of leading anatomical facts was so poor that he was capable of writing, “a leaf that absorbs moisture is called a root.“ 71 Then came Schiller and roused him out of his uncritical slumbers. A year and a half after that meeting Goethe was already aware that the “primitive form“ for which he had been seeking “was no child of the senses, but of the mind.“ 72 He would then no longer have been able to exclaim sarcastically to Schiller, “I am very glad to have ideas which I can see with my eyes,“ for he would have to say, “with my mind's eye,“ and that was just what Schiller meant. A few years later Goethe says that the Urpflanze, the primitive plant, is transcendental, and says of the Urtier, the primitive animal, “that, after all, is no more than the conception or idea of an animal,“ or else he speaks of ideal Urkörper, primitive bodies, and is careful to add, “realise the idea and it loses its value.“ Five-and-twenty years later Goethe wrote the little chapter on Bedenken und Ergebung, “Reflection and Submission,“ which I strongly advise you to read over and over again. In these two pages Goethe clearly points out the cause of the conflict between idea, independent of space and time, and experience which is confined in space and time. Then he goes on, “that is why in the idea simultaneity and successive sequence are closely bound up together, while in all empirical experience, on the contrary, they are always kept apart.“ You can now understand these words exactly, since you

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can apply them to the concrete conceptions which you have gathered from plant life, but which unfortunately Goethe has not named in the passage quoted. You can also understand Goethe when he adds, “A natural operation which idea represents to our minds as being at the same time consecutive and simultaneous seems to drive us into a state of something like madness.“ In fact the road which Goethe pointed out in his doctrine of metamorphosis is a dangerous road which should not be followed without critical caution. For if we look upon our ideas as being experience, that road will lead us into the condition of madness in which our modern biology has enmeshed itself, and which threatens utterly to extinguish the power of independent observation; whereas, on the contrary, if we draw ideas from our experience, we shall be following a road which will lead us into that world of the eye of which Goethe was the herald, and the importance of which for the future of culture no human being is yet capable of estimating.

 * * * * * *

    Let us go back to Kant. Although we may seem to have wandered far afield we have yet reached a point where in the metamorphosis of plants Goethe reaches out his hand to meet that of Kant. I am sure, moreover, that there are many of Kant's views that you will understand much better, now that you have reached him through Goethe, than if you had attempted to follow him along the road of abstract conceptions. Goethe, insensibly, and while simply giving homogeneity and unity to the masses of forms which his eye detected, has led us into the depths of Kant's philosophy.
    In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant goes back to Plato, in order, as he says, to re-introduce the word idea in its “original sense.“ What this original meaning was he tries to express in the following way: “Ideas according

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to Plato are prototypes of things themselves, and not mere keys to possible experiences.“ This does away with our modern weakly interpretation of the word as almost synonymous with “thought“; an idea is no mechanical help, no intellectual scheme for the more convenient collection of experiences, but an idea is an image, and, as you will learn from our later lectures, “a creative fact. A vegetable, an animal, the regular ordering of the structure of the universe, presumably therefore also the complete laws of nature, show clearly that they are only possible in consonance with ideas“ (R.V. 369 f.). You see how all this is based upon perception, and how closely akin this method of thinking is to that of Goethe, which was for ever hunting for prototypes for that established order which it had discovered in the vegetable and animal kingdoms. But remember that Kant's eye is by no means directed outwards, but altogether inwards; he analyses everything which forces itself upon his intellect exactly as he did Westminster Bridge, and takes to pieces the several component parts just as he does when the impression of the star-studded heaven strikes his soul. Not for a moment, therefore, do the notions of Idea and Experience correspond, as was the case with Goethe, to the prejudice of clear recognition. On the contrary, Kant's whole philosophy in its origin as in its aim springs from the perception that our human experience, of which to this day many men untrained, or wrongly trained, in philosophy speak as something simple and palpable, is in reality a very complex proceeding, and that the formation of ideas is the result of a tendency which is certainly inevitable, but at the same time dangerous. It was to the disentanglement of these conditions, to the so-called critique of recognition, that Kant devoted the greatest part of his life. A first result of his analysis runs as follows: it is true that experience is rooted in the impressions of our senses, but beyond

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that it stands in need of understanding, since no experience can have any existence without the combination into unities of our innumerable observations; this combination must manifestly take place according to laws which exist within ourselves, not outside of ourselves: 73 without understanding it would be impossible for me to reduce the endless multiplicity of experiences to fixed, definite “things,“ and at the same time to discriminate between them. 74 Still less should I be able to unite two different phenomena like “caterpillar“ and “butterfly,“ and to assert that the one is a transformation of the other.
    So much as a first guide to what is meant by experience. A second important result of Kant's bears upon ideas, and establishes the fact that ideas never fully grasp the true value of a phenomenon, but go no further than formulating the particular view that our thoughts take of it. Our understanding deals with the perception of things, our reason, as the parent of ideas, with the understanding which fixes and limits those things. “If then pure reason also deals with phenomena,“ says Kant, “it still stands in no direct relation to them and to the perception of them, but only has to do with the understanding and its judgments“ (R.V. 363). Every single word here is of pure gold. Ideas do indeed “deal with phenomena,“ that is to say they are called into being by objects perceived, and aim at a renewed perception of them; yet they are not directly in relation with the perceptions by means of which we attained a knowledge of these objects, but with our understanding and its judgments, that is to say with what we human beings think of them. In short, the range of the idea is determined by the limits of human powers. You have but to consider Goethe's doctrine of the Metamorphosis of Plants, and you will be in a position thoroughly to understand the general meaning of this assertion without any

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deeper initiation into Kant's philosophy. For it is certain that Goethe's idea had an objective foundation, formed upon the observation of thousands of plants: but it is even as certain that his idea is concerned with them not indirectly but directly. “I do not know how I can disentangle myself,“ wrote Goethe, as you will remember, from Padua: he wishes to disentangle himself, his thoughts, his thoughts about things, not the things themselves. Long and passionately were “the understanding and its judgments“ at work before the idea of the transformation of lateral organs, or indeed possibly of the whole united organs of plants, revealed itself to the reasoning power which was directed upon them out of one form, a form which no human eye had ever seen, and which Goethe only called a leaf for want of a generic term “by which to describe an organ capable of such various transformations.“ 75 No sensible man will deny that this idea is an image and not an experience, and even the most unphilosophical man in the world must see and admit that this image relates not directly to the objects perceived, but to the verdict pronounced upon them by the human understanding and thought. Goethe's assumed “primitive organ“ is so little a matter of perception, that we have not even a word applicable to it, but when Goethe lets fall the expression “great abstract unity,“ 76 we feel that the descriptive word “leaf“ better meets the case; for an idea must really be an image serving to help us to a clear comprehension of our perceptions, not a logical conclusion, and equally not an abstract conception. An idea is productive, creative, it is the servant of that power of imagination of which Kant says that it must not run into fanaticism, but must “invent under the strict supervision of Reason“ (R.V. 798), and even if the outer eye should fail to see these invented forms, and consequently the understanding should only name them clumsily and tentatively, that is

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to say, by symbols, their essence is none the less perceptibility. If Goethe had written in his notebook, “Hypothesis: everything in plant life is abstract unity,“ he would have rendered us and himself scant service; whereas the words, “Hypothesis: everything is leaf“ (see page 64), have the value of a permanent enrichment of the human world of conceptions. The idea, then, although purely a product of human thought, is derived from perception, and its final goal is once more perception. How clear is its value has been shown by Kant in a noble image, for the understanding of which I must remind you of the following elementary fact in optics.
    Think of a bi-convex lens such as you have in the best magnifying glass. Such a lens has the following peculiarity, — a certain point marked X is called its focus, at which distant rays of light are collected and generate heat.
    I hold this lens before my eyes and look at an object through it, and if the object be beyond the point X, I shall see it with the utmost clearness, but inverted. If I move the object nearer, it is magnified, but less defined, and will suddenly disappear altogether; that happens when it reaches the point X. The first illustration shows you why. The rays go out parallel to one another, and consequently there is no point, however distant, where the eye can gather them together. Now if I proceed to move the object nearer so that it comes to lie between the point X and the lens, it immediately reappears, and no longer inverted, but upright, and if the lens is very convex, greatly magnified. Now whereas the previous image was a true image, an image which you saw where the object stood, the present image exists only as an imaginary phantasy of the brain. Indeed, there takes place an unconscious operation of thought, and involuntarily we refer every single point to one lying far away in the background. That is to say, we transfer the

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object to a spot where as a matter of fact it does not exist. This is especially conspicuous in concave mirrors which enable us to call up living apparitions in the empty air. If we construct this on purely optical prin-
ciples, as we did before, you will see that we are claiming an imaginary focus for our given lens or mirror: the physicists call this the “Virtual Focus,“ and in Kant's day the expression in use was still the Latin focus imagin-
arius, and that implies that in the contemplation of the image, we picture to our imagination a focus where in reality none exists.
    With the clear representation of these optical facts
before your eyes you are now in a position fully to appreciate the value of Kant's instructive illustration. He tells you in detail that ideas will never furnish you with “conceptions of special objects.“ You have seen

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before that although metamorphosis may have given us the idea of one primitive organ in plant life, still it has not given us the conception of a certain object, but only an “abstract unity“ on behalf of which we have to content ourselves with the symbol “leaf.“ Obviously, then, ideas do not possess what Kant calls a “constitutive“ value, indeed they bring no concrete contribution to the true building up of knowledge, for which they have no more than a “regulative,“ in other words a directing importance. Now comes the illustration. “On the other hand, however, ideas have a pre-eminent and indispensably necessary regulative use, namely the directing of the understanding to a certain aim, in respect of which the lines of all its rules converge upon one point. Being no more than an idea, this point may be compared to a focus imaginarius, for it lies altogether beyond the bounds of all possible experience, so that our concrete notions concerning things do not in reality proceed from them, although they may seem to do so. Nevertheless this focus imaginarius is of real use, inasmuch as it serves for the attainment of the most perfect uniformity together with a maximum of expansion. Out of this there springs a delusion as if these directing lines were the output of an object itself lying outside the field of empirically possible perception — just as objects are seen behind the flat surface of the mirror: but this illusion, which we are able to prevent from exercising a deceptive power, is yet indispensably necessary if we wish, in addition to those objects which are before our eyes, also to see those which lie far away behind our backs, — that is to say, if we would train our understanding to extend beyond every empirical experience, and so to attain the utmost possible degree of expansion“ (R.V. 672 seq.). You see how sharply, and at the same time how clearly, Kant defines and limits the essence of idea; and we understand him when he tells us of ideas that they “are not

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drawn from nature,“ that is to say, our interrogation of nature is prompted by these ideas, and “our perception of nature is in our judgment deficient so long as it is inadequate to our pre-formed ideas“ (R.V. 673). Ideas are thus seen to lie in the focus imaginarius, and it becomes clear that their distinctive feature must be that they “go beyond the bounds of possible experience“ (R.V. 377). Certainly without experience we should not be able to lay hold of them: they are formed on a plane optically lying far behind experience, and therefore it is impossible that “any object furnished by experience should ever be in agreement with them.“ And so we arrive at the fundamental result: idea and experience can never correspond, at any rate never completely and lastingly.
    All this seems to me quite clear. And when Kant says, “all human intuition begins with perception, follows on to comprehension, and ends in ideas“ (R.V. 730), we can, as it were, see his meaning with our eyes long before we have plunged into the labyrinth of the Reine Vernunft (Pure Reason), and you may take my word for it that this appreciation of his meaning is absolutely correct. You must only hold fast to the image of the focus imaginarius — a true Kantian image, and to the example of the metamorphosis of plants — a true Goethian example. The perceptions, — in other words, the experience — are the numbers of plants that are under observation: purely scientific comparative anatomy, — whether consisting in practical study under the microscope, such as that of Kaspar Fr. Wolff, or in the collection of double carnations as Goethe collected them, — means work with comprehensions and judgments: these accumulate enormously, their numbers fill us with despair. We do not see our way out — “I do not see how I can disentangle myself“; — we take refuge in experience: at a point nearer than the focus of our eye's lens

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the material image fades away, while an imaginary one, greatly magnified, takes its place, and now in the distant background of the focus imaginarius we see an idea, and that furnishes our understanding with the guide to a certain goal, and at one and the same time lends to its endeavours “a maximum of uniformity combined with a maximum of expansion.“ Those are the three steps: experience, comprehension, idea. 77
    The culminating point of the Critique of Pure Reason is this sentence: “all human recognition begins with perceptions, leads thence to comprehension, and ends with ideas.“ It introduces the last section of the “elementary instruction“: it ends the main work: the Methoden Lehre, or doctrine of method which follows, making hardly one-fifth of the book, is as it were only an appendix, just as at the end of a work on the anatomy and physiology of plants you will find a sketch of their systematic classification. I do not wish to lead you into the mistake of supposing that these observations of ours will render you at one bound capable of understanding Kant's metaphysics, or of considering yourselves as above the necessity of laborious study: yet you must surely feel that the practical understanding of the way in which this man “saw,“ must furnish an incomparable help to such a study, and you will find this to be more and more justified at every step that we shall take; and I cannot but call your attention to the fact that almost all the misunderstanding of Kant is rooted in the underestimation, if not in the entire neglect, of the perceptive element in his method of thinking. The special, predominant power of imagination which we have seen to be so significant of Kant's intellect, is at the same time characteristic of his philosophy, — which is something far more concrete and tangible than people usually give him credit for, and which to be understood must, if I may say so, be seized quite as much by the eye

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as by abstract ratiocination. It is true that the man shuts his eyes to the outside world, and so the figures of which he makes use often lack brilliancy, though, as you have seen by the focus imaginarius, they are never wanting in sharpness; but, in spite of all, his investigation of the soul is no logical ratiocination, no juggling with words, as he more than once contemptuously says: this is, indeed, true perception. It was undoubtedly this fact which attracted Goethe to him, and led to the saying that to read a page of Kant was like entering a brilliantly lighted room (G. 9, 173). But our professional metaphysicians, with the exception of a few men in whom a reaction is beginning to take place, have remained mere quibblers: our schoolmen still rule the roast in every camp, and not least where there is a semblance of connection with physics, experimental psychology, statistics. etc.: and so it comes to pass that we find a vast difference between Kant's methods of thought and almost everything that we meet with under the name of philosophy. I am bound to call your attention to this at once, and I can do so without going beyond the limits of our subject; on the contrary, it will enable you to appreciate the gulf which separates the perceptive from the abstract method.
    Like their forerunners in the Middle Ages our modern philosophers revel in definition: and yet there is no greater mistake than to assume, from a logical point of view, that the sharper a definition is the better it is, and the more value it possesses. This does not even hold good in mathematics. For a definition in mathematics is either an arbitrary suppression of perception in favour of a practically applicable construction — such, for instance, as “a point is that which has neither parts nor magnitude,“ or, “a line is that which has length without breadth,“ — or else it means nothing more than a convention as to the technical expressions to be adapted to a figure with which our power of perception has made us

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familiar from the outset, — as, for example, what we are to understand by the “centre“ and “diameter“ of a circle. In Louis Couturat's De l'infini mathématique (1896), a work of decisive scientific importance, we read, Toutes les définitions mathématiques sont purement nominales, et par suite présupposent toujours le concept qu'elles ont l'air de construire (p. 342). And if we go a step further we find Pascal telling us that geometry is incapable of defining any single object with which it deals, such as motion, numbers, space (De l'esprit géométrique, sect. 1). Thus even in mathematics it is practical applicability that alone counts. As regards nature, however, the more a definition is considered, the more we find that it relates exclusively to a word and not to a thing. For instance, a leaf is a thing which every man knows by perception: try to define it and you will be running your head against mighty difficulties. Claude Bernard, one of the most important empirical investigators of the last century, affirms that: On ne saurait rien définir dans les sciences de la nature; toute tentative de définition ne traduit qu'une simple hypothèse. And in another place he says, dans toute science les définitions sont illusoires. 78 Botanists have learnt this to their cost. Under the influence of Goethe's doctrine of metamorphosis they tried to get out of the difficulty with “the leaf in its transcendental sense“; the attempt led to nothing but confusion. 79 Then when the word leaf would no longer serve their purpose, they took refuge behind the word phyllom. The ancient languages are continually working wonders for us: the primitive Germanic root blô means blossom as well as leaf, and shows how our ancestors of old forestalled their great son; yet the substantive phyllom, derived from the Greek word for leaf, and conveying no meaning to our living ears, gave rise to more and more juggling with words. Then the artists in definition set to work, and with the help of the cleverly invented
 
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phyllom soon set up a very plausible classification, according to which there were to be Phyllophytes (leaf plants) and Thallophytes (leafless plants), and the latter were to include the algae, fungi, and lichens. It certainly was always difficult for the average man to understand why the algae were to have no leaves, and now that the material for observation has assumed such gigantic proportions and has been subjected to more accurate investigation, the untenability of the definition, however greatly it may be extended, is fully demonstrated. To be sure we still speak of thallophytes, because it is a word of practical utility, and because our actual knowledge of algae, fungi, and lichens in no way depends upon a name; still, if you look up Goebel's Grundzüge der Systematik (Fundamental Features of Systematization), you will read that “we can apply the conceptions of leaf and stem in their case as well as in that of the higher plants.“ 80 If we wished to set up a reaction, and to limit the artificial expression phyllom in the strictest possible way, it would render us no further service, for it would then afford little material for observation, while it would separate by main force where no separation exists; in short, it would become a mere word; if we take the other alternative and keep on extending its signification it must lose all informative value, gaining indeed a wealth of material, but beggarly poor in conceptions, and so again a mere word. If the phyllom-less plants are also to possess phylloms like the others, then we had better turn our attention to other things. Definitions, as you see, far from possessing the importance of foundation and corner stones in the observation of nature, as the philosophers would have us believe, are simply technical means of mutual understanding which, if they are to have any value, must be taken in such a manner as to have a rather vague or, if you prefer to call it so, an elastic application to the subject under observation.

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Of course if a system is purely mental, your philosopher may go on spinning definitions as merrily and as keenly as he pleases; but the net result will be nothing more than a great calculation in algebra where, if all goes well, everything may be accurately correct even though the letters a and b, x and y, should still remain letters and not concrete values. This is what Kant calls “building houses of cards and chatter.“ On the contrary, in any truly scientific system of philosophy based upon facts it is entirely contrary to reason to expect that the same expression should bear exactly the same logical meaning in every connection in which it may be found. What never changes is the point of view itself; but the mutability of definition shows clearly that we have to deal with a living power of intuition, and with a nature which defies all adequate comprehension, in contradistinction to logical and arbitrary lectures from professorial chairs. Kant rightly observes, “Philosophy-mongering would be in a sad plight if it were unable to deal with an idea until it should have been defined,“ and he confesses to the following principle to which I wish to call your attention at once at the beginning of our work in common, “In philosophy definition, as conveying deliberately measured lucidity, must be the end rather than the beginning of a work.“ 81
    I have inserted this observation in order to impress upon you the fact that Kant the thinker never strays beyond the bounds of a visible and tangible world, thus standing in sharp contrast to all the logic chopping of the schools: I wanted, moreover, at the outset of your studies to warn you against attaching too much importance to definitions, and against giving ear to objections raised by pedants on this score; urging you on the contrary to trust to Kant's guidance, and to enjoy a clearer understanding of him than you had expected to attain. “We can often speak with abundant and precise knowledge

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upon a subject without being able to explain it.“ This is Kant's answer to the philosophers who would fain have men enter upon the field of their systems through a gateway of the most abstract ideas. 82 We may then, with the help of concrete examples, discuss experience and idea without having attempted any precise logical definition of either. It might be philosopher-like, but it would be quite senseless and unscientific if we were to attempt to describe before we have seen, and to winnow before we have gleaned. In the course of these lectures we shall often return to experience and idea: I hope so to arrange matters that your knowledge may grow and grow until our present standpoint shall seem to you no more than the lowest rung of the ladder: yet true knowledge, in contradistinction to mere learning, is a fact, and for facts we can only prepare ourselves by action: what is to bear fruit to-morrow must lie hidden in the mystery of to-day. Later on Plato and Kant will be your study, and in them you will find if not everything, at any rate a goodly store of what is needed for the “completion of your work with exact lucidity.“
    Since we have been led into the question of the value of definitions, together with that of philosophy working on logical and theoretical lines, I should like to add another point of view which is closely bound up with our present investigation into experience and idea.
    You have seen that Kant appeals to Plato in order to re-introduce the word “idea“ in its old signification. He does this with a full sense of its importance, rejecting on the one hand the bungling emendations of this good old word, while on the other he is shy of “coining new words.“ Yet the use of the word “idea“ in Kant is based upon an analysis of the human intellect, for which the Greeks had not the smallest inclination. That is why idea in Plato and idea in Kant do not correspond, but rather act as two symbols pointing to the same

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hardly expressible meaning. This will not become quite clear to you until we reach the lectures upon Plato and Kant. But there is one thing that you can understand at once, which is that Kant's conception of “idea“ is so rich and so defined that he deems it necessary to distinguish between ideas that belong rather to perception and those which belong rather to abstract thought: the former are the true “ideas,“ the latter he calls ratiocinations (Vernunft Begriffe). But no sharp distinction is possible: the only important matter is to call attention to the directions in which the human intellect moves: it sometimes happens that Idea and Ratiocination, in accordance with the suggestion of the moment, can be placed in direct opposition to one another: at other times they may be so entirely synonymous that Kant sometimes makes use of the one word for the other, incurring no little abuse on that account. Wiseacres who look upon a single word as if it were a loose coat which they try to tailor into a tight fit with the scissors of hair-splitting definitions, reproach Kant with obscurity, inconsistency, and confusedness: he had no notion of definition, he contradicted his own definitions, etc., and yet it is a simple case of perception. In the case of the idea of metamorphosis you have seen clearly how far that idea is at the same time capable and incapable of being perceived. At one time Goethe saw his Urpflanze (primitive plant) “with his eyes“: then it was idea: at another time he speaks of an “abstract entity,“ then it was a ratiocination. It sometimes happens that in the consideration of an idea our attention is specially claimed by what is abstract in it, and then it is just as important to distinguish between the ideal conceptions and the true conceptions (or ratiocinations, Verstandes Begriffe, as Kant calls them) as it is to separate the symbolical images which are the result of ideas, from objects seen in actual experience. It is therefore important to protect

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the fact of the formation of ideas against misapprehension and misuse, and to insure this it will be well to hoist a danger signal against both. Hence the definition, “a conception which goes beyond the possibilities of experience is either an idea or a ratiocination.“ That a single word did not suffice was not because this princely intellect possessed less consistency and clearness than any first-class private tutor, but because it was no mere logical shadow, but the embodiment of an idea, a highly complex idea, which was at stake: and so two words were required to do what might have been the work of one, whether in world-wide expansion or imprisoned as in the grip of a vice.
    We have now made it clear, without any further need of discussion, that “the senses cannot furnish us with any object which shall correspond with the idea formed of it“ (R.V. 383), and moreover that “in experience it is impossible to arrive at anything which exactly coincides with ideas.“ Goethe himself later on confessed in a happily inspired moment: “the idea cannot be represented in experience, indeed it hardly admits of proof: if a man does not profess it no amount of ocular demonstration will make him master of it.“ But there is one thing to which I must again draw your attention before we close the chapter on experience and idea for which the conversation between Schiller and Goethe has given such an opportune occasion. We must treat of a special contrast which exists between Kant and Goethe.
    Goethe believed himself to be so entirely wrapt up in the objective perception of nature, that until Schiller roused him up he was even unconscious that he possessed ideas. As a matter of fact, however, his conception of nature consisted, before the meeting with Schiller as well as after it, chiefly in the fact that he was actually dominated by ideas. It was the intense power of perception, and not the minutiae of experience, which constituted

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his special gift and directed his aim. This is a subject as to which we are still not a little hazy. I have quoted Goethe's own words to the effect that his sight was not keen. It is true that as the occasion arose he would work with the microscope and even embark upon experiments upon the influence of coloured light upon the growth of plants, but he had no time for minute observation which gave him no pleasure, and for which he had no special aptitude. On one occasion he confesses, “I had no sense of what is positive, but insisted upon everything being explained if not intelligibly, at any rate historically.“ Only consider his discovery of the intermaxillary bone. The discovery was due to no patient work, but was simply a declaration of Goethe's from the very beginning that it must be there. He started from an idea, from the idea of uniformity in the structure of the skeleton of the vertebrate animal, and it turned out to be right. Yet every serious and capable naturalist will agree with me in the contention that the essence of modern science lies in the rejection of all such apodeictic prophecies, and that it only accepts as valid the decisions of experience. Goethe was a brilliant genius, but in spite of that he gave rise to no little confusion by his uncritical jumble of experience and idea, and by his not always happy play of imagination. For instance, Goethe's endeavour to refer the whole of the organs of plants to one idea “leaf,“ proved to be as incapable of being maintained as it was fruitless. It needed no less than five ideas, Thallome, Rhizome, Caulome, Phyllome, and Trichome, to be set up in order to shelter his metamorphosis and obtain from it some slight service to science. 83 The dogma that the framework of the skull is built up of vertebrae made confusion worse confounded; not that the idea might not be highly stimulating, but because it went ahead of observation which later on showed that one part of the cranium of vertebrate animals proceeds from

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formations of the dermal skeleton, while another part corresponds with the branchial arches, so that the analogy with the vertebrae can at most apply only to a portion and not to the whole of the skull. Moreover, the origin of this particular portion is so obscure that it is rather an academical question for Zoologists than a fact contributing to the advancement of science. 84 Goethe himself admitted later, “in my method of investigation, of knowledge, and of delight therein I am entirely dependent upon symbols.“ 85 This is not a method for any one else to copy: it would shatter all science to shivers. With Goethe, indeed, the case is different. He is not dealing with science pure and simple, but with that world of the eye whose function it is to be to give a new form to the whole aggregate of barbaric knowledge in the interest of civilised culture. I shall return to this point in the next lecture. Kant, the man who was so chary of directing his glance upon the world around him, and in whom one might in consequence presuppose a preference for the world of ideas, was far more jealous of the rights of experience, as opposed to idea, than Goethe. One of the most prominent results of Kant's analysis of human reason consists in the sharp distinction which he draws between experience and idea, and in the proof that “in the consideration of nature experience arms us with the rule and is the source from which truth springs“ (R.V. 375). Let there be no misunderstanding as to this. The high importance which Kant attaches to practical ideas for the life of man, cannot be altogether unknown to you: according to him, “they are always in the highest degree fruitful, and indispensably necessary so far as real actions are concerned“ (R.V. 385). We see by the example of the focus imaginarius, alluded to above, how indispensable he holds theoretical ideas to be for science, and in his Critique of Pure Reason, and his Critique of the Power of Judgment, we are led to important expositions

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of the law according to which we men set up genera and species, — of the meaning of teleology, of the finite and infinite nature of the Cosmos, etc. There can be no question of any misunderstanding or disparagement of ideas. No one would have been more pleased than Kant to subscribe to Couturat's dictum, Les idées sont le fondement même de la realité, 86 “ideas are the very foundation of reality.“ What really constitutes the contrast between Kant and Goethe is that Kant always without reserve recognised the inexorable power of concrete facts, and therefore subjected ideas to a far keener analysis than Goethe did, who although in theory after the conversation with Schiller he recognised his mistake, nevertheless remained to the end of his life inclined to reckon as natural experiences ideas which he had not even clearly formulated. If we may trust Eckermann's memory, Goethe said, as late as 1827: “I discovered the law of metamorphosis“ (G. 1, 2, 27). And he continued to look upon the indescribable and unthinkable idea of metamorphosis as an analogy to those laws of motion which have been arrived at by accurate observation; he never rightly understood the difference between his method and that of exact science. 87 Kant's confession of faith, on the contrary, was — “outside of experience no evidence of truth is to be found“; that is at once the confession of all exact science, and the banner under which free men go out to war against Obscurantism, against Dogmatism, against Superstition. In the whole history of the world down to the present day no philosopher has represented the inalienable rights of experience with such assurance and so convincingly as Kant. No wonder the more important naturalists side with him. Not only has he maintained our right to open our eyes, and proved with the sternness of a philosopher that the walls which are for ever being raised in the name of morality and religion against freedom of research and freedom of opinion, are

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really bulwarks of prehistoric dishonesty and heathenism incarnate, — but he has laid the greatest weight upon warning us against enemies hidden in the twists and turns of our own brains. That is the end and aim of all his labours. Idea and theory and system are all to be enlisted, but as mediators and helpers, not as founders and rulers. Criticism such as this necessarily leads to a series of limitations and to the mapping out of the frontier lines of experience. Far be it from us to mistake our ideas and hypotheses and theories for experience, not even when we see and are compelled to admit that no experience would be possible without them. In this way the conception of experience is made clearer, though at the same time its boundaries are more and more closely drawn. Experience is stripped of the impertinent fribble of impotent materialists, and taught that so far from leading to anything and being a sort of divinity, it is nothing but the handmaid of a despotic and creative intellect, of “the magician king in the Tower.“ But even the King must learn modesty; for it is only in experience purified in this manner that the “fountain of truth“ gushes forth, that fountain which alone “supplies the evidence of truth,“ and “furnishes the law of truth.“
    The gist and trend of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason would justify us in entitling it the preparatory school of pure experience.
    The contrast between Goethe and Kant is patent. But if I have been unable to avoid trenching upon the field of theory, I must ask you to concentrate your thoughts to-day upon the innate and purely personal method of perception. This is the one thing that is of first and constant importance; every system contains a multitude of impersonal elements, and might be differently formulated in every succeeding century. But if we were merely to lay stress upon what differentiates the two men, we

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should only have achieved half of our task, and should have acquired nothing more than one of those popular flat pictures with everything either to the right or to the left, which to me are hateful: in order to obtain a solid image the third dimension is needed, — that of depth. The distinguishing difference to be observed in the two men is this, — that however much they may have been apparently opposites in their natural faculties and in what they achieved, they were none the less aiming at the same goal, and that goal was the encouragement of perception as against the claims of abstract logical thought. Goethe strives to promote perception by insisting upon the value of idea, which, as he says in one passage, “unlocks the inner sense of the observer.“ 88 Kant promotes perception by laying stress upon experience, and by an exact criticism of the very complicated conception which we call experience.
    This I think will have given you an exact appreciation, far better than the worthy Eckermann ever possessed, of what Goethe meant when he uttered the memorable words, “Instinctively I followed the same road as Kant.“ We only begin to understand any idea, when we recognise that there is more in it than can be expressed in words. Judgments are just as much symbols as words when they refer to something living. It is impossible to understand the meaning of “I followed the same road as Kant,“ 89 until we see that Goethe might, at the very same moment, have said to some other man, “I followed a different road from Kant's.“ True wisdom can never be imparted: the most that can be done is to lead up to it.
    For the purposes of this lecture I will now sum up the result of our comparative study of these two conceptions of idea and experience in the following way: an eye that is always receiving images, is at the same time like a mirror always reflecting them, and gathers its own

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ideas in the garden of nature in the full confidence that they grew there. That was the case with Goethe:
O lass sie walten,
Die unvergleichlichen Gestalten,
Wie sie dorthin mein Auge schickt. *
    No such mistake found a place in Kant's carefully locked brain: no light from without could blind him, and so he was able to draw a fine distinction between the outer world and the inner world, — defining in the workings of the human intellect how much is foreign and how much is inborn, — discriminating in comprehensible thought between matter and form. Unless Kant had possessed the special and phenomenal power of conception to which I called attention at the beginning of the lecture his equipment would have been inadequate: in order to take a world with its problems into consideration, a man must be able to lay claim to the possession of that world as his own: but had Kant been as completely wrapped up in nature as was Goethe, he would never have succeeded in perfecting that series of judgments to which mankind will always be compelled to revert in the interests of true science and true religion.
    But beyond this abstract conclusion there is a moral which I would fain draw out of these considerations of ours; and that moral is, — if we give ourselves up to nature exclusively we lose ourselves in her. No one knew that better than Goethe. There is a passage in which he says, “the idea of metamorphosis is a very lofty, but at the same time a very dangerous gift from above. It leads to that which is without form, destroying and disintegrating knowledge.“ 90 In spite of this, even in his old age he was constantly relapsing into the mysticism of his youth. There can be no doubt that mysticism as a mental condition, and as a presentiment

    * O let them prevail, these incomparable forms, seen as my eye transmitted them.

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of transcendental worlds beyond our ken, is an intellectual phenomenon worthy of respect: sometimes it has even pointed the way to liberation from the chains of Dogma; in spite of that, as a mental disposition, it is to be held in abomination: the most brilliant intellect becomes childish when it strikes off on this wrong tack. Here again the great Kant is our deliverer for all time; nothing but true criticism such as he taught can steer us clear. Unhappily, in spite of the purifying influence of Kant, Goethe never was able to hold fast to the critical position for any length of time. He mourns over his fate as having been “born to the school of identity,“ 91 and a few years before his death he writes the regrettable words, “Matter can never exist without mind, nor mind without matter,“ 92 and the man who wrote this was the same man who a few years earlier admitted that the mere idea of transformation was dangerous and fatal to knowledge. Dualism is no theory, but a fact. It would no doubt be very pretty if we men instead of having two legs had only one: but as a matter of fact we have two, and are compelled to step out with the right and the left foot in turns, if we wish to go forward. All monism, be it what it may, leads in the end to a Buddhistic contemplation of the navel. If subject and object be one and the same, there is an end of all activity, whether of science or of soul.
    Goethe's genius naturally saved him from such a shipwreck as this. This noble man was rich in those contradictions in which true greatness reveals itself, and of which it is as prodigal as its mother nature. Of that you have just had plenty of evidence. Still more was he inspired when, instead of proclaiming his belief in a flat identity, he uttered the immortal saying, “where object and subject are in contact, there is life.“ Even though now and again he maintained that his “thinking was perception“ — those are his very words — “and was actually fused with the objects perceived,“ 93 there were other

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moments when he admitted that man must act as a lawgiver, 94 even in the presence of nature, and that is manifestly the very opposite of “fusion“; indeed, upon one occasion he said that “all attempts to solve the problems of nature, are really only the conflicts of the power of thought with perception.“ 95 The revelation of the essence of this inevitable conflict, was precisely what constituted the life-work of Kant. Even those least familiar with philosophical disputes can have no difficulty in understanding on the one hand the advantage of determining by analysis what part the “lawgiving“ thought of man plays in purely objective perception, — and on the other of showing how far perception in the first instance furnishes thought with material, and so points the way for the “lawgiver.“ There is no other possible way of arriving at a clear distinction between experience and idea.
    To the best of my ability 1 have now in the main accomplished the task which I set myself in this first lecture. Yet I must not conclude without briefly directing your attention to another field of perception with which I shall deal more fully in my next discourse: it is one in which the comparison between Goethe and Kant is so instructive, and such a valuable supplement to the knowledge that we have already gained, that it cannot be passed over in silence to-day. I am speaking of mathematics.
    The science of mathematics, to borrow a saying of Goethe's, is that form of perception which is altogether and exclusively the monopoly of the “lawgiving“ thought of man. Across that bridge of the eye to which I alluded at the beginning of my lecture there come images from without which man is not capable of inventing, and of which we are only aware when nature presents them to us; but, in the Magician King's castle there is also a world of forms, — forms which

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have no special relation to this or that real entity, and yet related to everything or nothing, rods and cranes and edges and angles, forms of which outside nature knows nothing, or at any rate knew nothing until this world of human phantoms had come into tangible existence in the shape of machines.
    “They see thee not for they see nought but phantoms,“ says Mephistopheles of the “Mothers“; these mothers are our mothers, — the mothers of the human race: it was from them that we inherited our grey brain-substance, and this is the Archimedean point, whence, as it were outside of nature, we spread over the Cosmos the net of mathematics, — mathematics out of which rise order, abstract form, disruption, self-mastery, lawgiving, to be embodied in human science.
    We shall have to go more closely into this hereafter. To-day we need do no more than determine the directly contradictory estimates formed by Goethe and Kant of this human invention called mathematics. Kant's declaration of faith runs thus: “Pure mathematics afford the truest appreciation, and are at the same time the model of the highest certainty in every field of thought“ (D. § 12), and he not only admires but loves the science of mathematics to such a degree that he considers that “it stirs our feelings in a similar, or even more sublime, way than the accidental beauties of nature.“ 96 Goethe, on the contrary, who has to admit that “division and addition did not lie in my nature,“ 97 was of opinion that “since the revival of mathematics, science has gone sadly astray.“ 98 Goethe was not only without any turn for mathematics, but he really showed very little understanding of the essence and practical importance of the science: Kant himself was no arithmetician, though he had a pre-eminent aptitude for mathematical perception. Here it was Goethe whose eyes were closed, Kant whose eyes were open; and these same open eyes of his enabled

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him to succeed in rearing up a work of real genius, a construction for all time. We may no doubt affirm without exaggeration that Kant's hypothesis of the origin of the heavenly bodies, taken up forty years later by Laplace and carried out into greater detail with the help of calculation, was one of the eminent results of genius in the exercise of the human power of perception.
    There is no need to enlarge upon what is a matter of common knowledge. You are acquainted with this hypothesis of an originally undifferentiated, chaotically nebular, primary mass of matter which owing to the attraction and repulsion of atoms acquired circulation, by means of which a central body was formed, and around that again others were collected, until all or at any rate the greater number of the suns (for some of these are still in a nebular state) came into existence; round the suns came their planets, and round the planets, rings, moons, asteroids, etc. Kant calls his hypothesis “an attempt to arrive at the mechanical origin of the whole structure of the universe,“ and this attempt was so brilliant that it still prevails in almost all theories both within and without the domain of exact science. I am, however, concerned to lay great stress upon the fact that we are not dealing here with a “theory“ in the sense of the laws of motion set up by Newton and Descartes, but with a spontaneously creative hypothesis. Its perceptibility is so powerful and so convincing that even men of science sometimes overlook this fact, and so the whole essence of Kant's achievement is misunderstood. In truth, as the mathematicians teach us, it becomes daily more clear that the hypothesis in question, whether in the form given to it by Kant or later by Laplace, again by Hervé Faye, or recently by J. Mooser, cannot be absolutely maintained in all its details, and never will be capable of actual proof. It is no theory, but an hypothesis: it

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forces into its scheme irreducible elements in order to make the whole comprehensible: here and there, as in all hypotheses either facts or calculations are treated very cavalierly. Lord Kelvin's calculation that if the whole earth had been originally made of solid steel it would by the velocity of its rotary motion have undergone almost the same flattening at the poles as exists now, and which according to Kant is generally explained by the admission of a gaseous condition prior to its liquid condition, — is among those things which have given rise to serious reflection upon the audacity of trying to make realities out of possibilities. Recently we have had a new hypothesis which is preferred by such eminent geologists and physiologists as Geikie, Nordenskjold, Ratzel, and others, according to which the heavenly bodies have arisen out of the combination of solid masses of dust and stones in cosmic space round special points of attraction. It is calculated that on an average about four and a half million hundredweight of meteorites fall in the course of a thousand years upon the surface of the earth out of interplanetary space. In an article in Petermann's Mitteilungen (1901, p. 217 seq.), Friedrich Ratzel comes to the conclusion that Kant's hypothesis is “not to be looked upon as the only, and in a certain sense, inevitable, hypothesis of the formation of the earth. Geography has in itself no ground for holding a primitive vapour and a consequent condition of fluid incandescence of the planet to be more probable than the aggregation of small heavenly bodies in various stages, out of the union of which, accompanied by heat, the earth and other heavenly bodies might have been started.“ The consideration of such previously unsuspected possibilities deprives the nebular hypothesis of Kant and Laplace of all dogmatic value as truth, and gives it more importance than what it really is, namely an ingenious result of the human intellect legislating for and

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dominating the whole notion of the universe with the freedom of a creator. That same analytical and constructive gift of imagination which you saw at work in the case of Westminster Bridge, here reaches boldly up to the stars and cries out, “Do but furnish me with matter, and out of it I will build you a world“ (H. Vor.).
    This method of perception, and consequently also this method of thinking, is as unlike Goethe as possible, for he would have had no use for abstract matter conceived as set in motion in accordance with physical laws.
    Here let me impress upon your closest attention what follows. The results at which we have already arrived have taught us that little information is to be gained from the general glimpses of the character and intellect of a man: unless we follow up our analysis, we only feel the burthen of a new fact, without soaring upon the wings of a new revelation. The contrast between the two methods of perception, that of Kant and that of Goethe, which has been brought into prominence in the consideration of mathematics and schematic observation, is joined to an unexpected, apparently paradoxical and psychologically very instructive judgment. Kant's theoretical methods of thought are clearer than those of Goethe. This hypothesis of Kant's as to the mechanical origin of the world's structure is much more intelligible, and, as being the result of actual sight, much easier to explain, than Goethe's doctrine of metamorphosis: and for this reason: Kant reduces a concrete observation, the world of stars, to a scheme — therefore equally to something directly perceptible, to something geometrically perceptible; Goethe, on the contrary, searches for an idea which perception has awakened in his reason, a symbol: the idea itself “transcends possible experience,“ and the symbol, while borrowing something from the faculty of perception yet extends beyond it. The pure thinking in his consideration of nature remains within

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the pale of possible perception, whereas the man who possesses the genius of observation attempts to surmount that pale. If the pure thinker adds perception to his thought, then his observation will be incontrovertible, absolutely human, and I might say logical. If a man who possesses the genius of observation succeeds in attaining theoretical reflection, then he will have something to impart which, being beyond the scope of logic, can only be expressed by indications, and will become indistinct and often full of contradictions. This is why Kant's teaching is clearer and easier to grasp than that of Goethe.
    This much more is worthy of observation. The intellect which thinks mathematically and mechanically, that is to say, which takes its stand upon the idea of the “lawgiver,“ faces the incomprehensible universe with its tables of the law, and forces its scheme upon it, while the priest of the eye preaches blind submission to perception, that “quite peculiar method of investigation“ which Goethe calls “the interrogation of nature.“ 99 Instead of, like Kant, forcing the whole Cosmos within the human soul, this interrogation of nature takes man out of himself and throws him into the arms of nature. Here the road leads to the mystic union with nature, to the state of the superman, the state in which the strong man who possesses a sure foot and an eye that never grows giddy can reach the highest pinnacle. “If thou darest thus equipped to climb the last stage, give me thy hand and open thine eyes upon the wide field of nature.“ But it is a state in which those who in their mad audacity dare to venture unprepared, not reaching out their hands for the support of true genius, but trusting to the vain rhetorician or the mystical fanatic, must inevitably take the fatal plunge into the abyss. Where Scheme exists no such vital danger lurks. True it may easily turn insignificant men into machines; but what of that? In the

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hands of the more gifted it becomes “the pride of the human intellect,“ as Kant exclaims in a moment of characteristic inspiration (R.V. 492). With the confidence of indifference it extends or compresses and mutilates every living form, every phenomenon of nature, till they fit into the Procrustean bed of lawgiving, purely human, mathematical observation; it creates vessels and organs for the increase of science which may become the common property of all mankind, even of the less gifted; and in virtue of the great share of arbitrary power which man has added to it, it is easily understood, convincing, and rich in results.
    I have finished. I refrain from summing up the results at which we have arrived, all the more willingly inasmuch as we shall more than once be obliged to return to the same subjects in the next lecture. In the person of Leonardo da Vinci we shall have another man belonging to the world of the eye, whom we may place in contrast with Kant. It will, however, be seen that Leonardo differs from Goethe no less than Kant does: and so we shall arrive at making a distinction between eye and eye. We shall be startled to find Goethe as seen from Leonardo's point of view approach very near to Kant in regard to certain shortcomings of the eye and the dominant power of thought, — and to find Leonardo the absolute artist, seen from Goethe's point of view, in certain important matters much more closely related to Kant than to the poet who was so rich in ideas. And so little by little the wealth and peculiar characteristics of Immanuel Kant will be unveiled before us, and by degrees we shall gain the power of penetrating into his thoughts. I hope that we have this day laid a good foundation for our further labours. We owe it to Kant to know no rest until he stands as a living personality before our eyes.
 
 
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