CHAPTER V – The Adventure of Reason
It is by precisely the same principle that the ur-plant reveals itself in the plant kingdom as a whole. Just as in the single plant organism the different parts are a graduated revelation of the ur-plant, so are the single kinds and species within the total plant world. As we let our glance range over all its ranks and stages (from the single-celled, almost formless alga to the rose and beyond to the tree), we are following, step by step, the revelation of the ur-plant. Barely hinting at itself in the lowest vegetable species, it comes in the next higher stages into ever clearer view, finally streaming forth in full glory in the magnificence of the manifold blossoming plants. Then, as its highest creation, it brings forth the tree, which, itself a veritable miniature earth, becomes the basis for innumerable single plant growths.
It has struck biologists of Goethe’s own and later times that contrary to their method he did not build up his study of the plant by starting with its lowest form, and so the reproach has been levelled against him of having unduly neglected the latter. Because of this, the views he had come to were regarded as scientifically unfounded. Goethe’s note-books prove that there is no justification for such a reproach. He was in actual fact deeply interested in the lower plants, but he realized that they could not contribute anything fundamental to the spiritual image of the plant as such which he was seeking to attain. To understand the plant he found himself obliged to pay special attention to examples in which it came to its most perfect expression. For what was hidden in the alga was made manifest in the rose. To demand of Goethe that in accordance with ordinary science he should have explained nature ‘from below upwards’ is to misunderstand the methodological basis of all his investigations.
Seen with Goethe’s eyes, the plant kingdom as a whole appears to be a single mighty plant. In it the ur-plant, while pressing into appearance, is seen to observe the very rule which we have found governing its action in the single plant – that of repeated expansion and contraction.7 Taking the tree in the sense already indicated, as the state of highest expansion along the ur-plant’s way of entering into spatial manifestation, we note that tree-formation occurs successively at four different levels – as fern-tree (also the extinct tree-form of the horsetail) among the cryptogams, as coniferous tree among the gymnosperms, as palm-tree among the monocotyledons, and lastly in the form of the manifold species of the leaf-trees at the highest level of the plant kingdom, the dicotyledons. All these levels have come successively into existence, as geological research has shown; the ur-plant achieved these various tree-formations successively, thus giving up again its state of expansion each time after having reached it at a particular level.
From the concept of the ur-plant Goethe soon learned to develop another concept which was to express the spiritual principle working in a particular plant species, just as the ur-plant was the spiritual principle covering the plant kingdom as a whole. He called it the type. In the manifold types which are thus seen active in the plant world we meet offsprings, as it were, of the mother, the ‘ur-plant’, which in them assumes differentiated modes of action.
The present part of our discussion may be concluded by the introduction of a concept which Goethe formed for the organ of cognition attained through contemplating nature in the state of becoming, as the plant had taught him to do.
Let us look back once again on the way in which we first tried to build up the picture of leaf metamorphosis. There we made use, first of all, of exact sense-perceptions to which we applied the power of memory in its function as their keeper. We then endeavoured to transform within our mind the single memory pictures (leaf forms) into one another. By doing so we applied to them the activity of mobile fantasy. In this way we actually endowed, on the one hand, objective memory, which by nature is static, with the dynamic properties of fantasy, and, on the other hand, mobile fantasy, which by nature is subjective, with the objective character of memory. Now, for the new organ of cognition arising from the union of these two polar faculties of the soul, Goethe coined the significant expression, exact sensorial fantasy.8 In terms of our knowledge of man’s psycho-physical make-up, acquired earlier, we can say that, just as the nervous system forms the basis for memory, and the blood the basis for fantasy, so the ‘exact sensorial fantasy’ is based on a newly created collaboration of the two.
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Our observations have reached a point where we may consider that stage in the life cycle of the single plant where, by means of the process of pollination, the seed acquires the capacity to produce out of itself a new example of the species. Our discussion of this will bring home the fundamental difference in idea that arises when, instead of judging a process from the standpoint of the mere onlooker, we try to comprehend it through re-creating it inwardly.
Biological science of our day takes it for granted that the process uniting pollen with seed in the plant is an act of fertilization analogous to that which occurs among the higher organisms of nature. Now it is not to be gainsaid that to external observation this comparison seems obvious, and that it is therefore only natural to speak of the pollen as the male, and of the ovule as the female, element, and of their union as entirely parallel to that between the sexes in the higher kingdoms of nature.
Goethe confesses that at first he himself ‘had credulously put up with the ruling dogma of sexuality’. He was first made aware of the invalidity of this analogy by Professor Schelver who, as Superintendent of the Jena Botanical Institute, was working under Goethe’s direction and had trained himself in Goethe’s method of observing plants. This man had come to see that if one held strictly to the Goethean practice of using nothing for the explanation of the plant but what one could read from the plant itself, one must not ascribe to it any sexual process. He was convinced that for a Goethean kind of biology it must be possible to find, even for the process of pollination, an idea derived from nothing but the two principles of plant life: growth and formation.