CHAPTER V – The Adventure of Reason
If the process of pollination is what the plant tells us it is, then the question arises as to the reason for the occurrence of such a process in the life cycle of the fully developed plant. Goethe himself has not expressed himself explicitly on this subject. But his term ‘spiritual anastomosis’ shows that he had some definite idea about it. Let us picture in our mind what happens physically in the plant as a result of pollination and then try to read from this picture, as from a hieroglyph, what act of the spiritual principle in the plant comes to expression through it.
Without pollination there is no ripening of the seed. Ripening means for the seed its acquisition of the power to bring forth a new and independent plant organism through which the species continues its existence within nature. In the life cycle of the plant this event takes place after the organism has reached its highest degree of physical perfection. When we now read these facts in the light of the knowledge that they are deeds of the activity of the type, we may describe them as follows:
Stage by stage the type expends itself in ever more elaborate forms of appearance, until in the blossom a triumph of form over matter is reached. A mere continuation of this path could lead to nothing but a loss of all connexion between the plant’s superphysical and physical component parts. Thus, to guarantee for the species its continuation in a new generation, the formative power of the type must find a way of linking itself anew to some part of the plant’s materiality. This is achieved by the plant’s abandoning the union between its two polar growth-principles and re-establishing it again, which in the majority of cases takes place even in such a way that the bearers of the two principles originate from two different organisms.
By picturing the process in this way we are brought face to face with a rule of nature which, once we have recognized it, proves to hold sway at all levels of organic nature. In general terms it may be expressed as follows:
In order that spiritual continuity may be maintained within the coming and going multitude of nature’s creations, the physical stream must suffer discontinuity at certain intervals.
In the case of the plant this discontinuity is achieved by the breaking asunder of the male and female growth-principles. When they have reunited, the type begins to abandon either the entire old plant or at least part of it, according to whether the species is an annual or a perennial one, in order to concentrate on the tiny seed, setting, as it were, its living seal on it.
This is as far as we can go in describing this mysterious process, at least at the present stage of our considerations.
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Our pursuit of Goethe’s way of observing the life of the plant has brought us to a point where it becomes possible to rectify a widespread error concerning his position as an evolutionary theorist.
Goethe has been honourably mentioned as a predecessor of Darwin. The truth is, that the idea of evolution emerging from Goethe’s mode of regarding nature is the exact opposite of the one held by Darwin and – in whatever modified form – by his followers. A brief consideration of the Darwinian concepts of inheritance and adaptation will show this.
Goethe’s approach to his conception of the type is clear evidence that he did not undervalue the factor of adaptation as a formative element in nature; we have seen that he became acquainted with it in studying the same plant species under different climatic conditions. In his view, however, adaptation appears not as the passive effect of a blindly working, external cause, but as the response of the spiritual type to the conditions meeting it from outside.
The same applies to the concept of inheritance. Through inheritance Goethe saw single, accessory characteristics of a species being carried over from one generation to the next; but never could the reappearance of the basic features of the species itself be explained in this way. He was sufficiently initiated into nature’s methods to know that she was not in need of a continuity of the stream of physical substance, in the sense of the theory of inheritance, to guarantee a continuance of the features of the species through successive generations, but that it was her craft to achieve such continuance by means of physical discontinuity.
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Goethe was not temperamentally given to reflecting deliberately about his own cognitional processes. Moreover, the excess of reflexion going on around him in the intellectual life of his younger days inclined him to guard himself with a certain anxiety against philosophical cogitations. His words to a friend – ‘Dear friend, I have done it well, and never reflected about thinking’ – bring this home to us. If in his later years Goethe could become to some degree epistemologically conscious of his spiritual achievements, as, for instance, his essay on Intuitive Judgment shows, he owed this to his friendship with Schiller, who became for him a kind of soul mirror, in which he could see the reflexion of his own processes of consciousness. Indeed, at their first personal encounter, significant as it was for their whole later relationship, Schiller – though all unconsciously – performed a decisive service of this kind for him. Goethe himself speaks of the occasion in his essay Happy Encounter (Gliickliches Ereignis), written twelve years after Schiller’s death.
The occasion was, outwardly regarded, fortuitous: both men were leaving a lecture on natural science at the University of Jena, Schiller having been present as Professor of History in the University, and Goethe as its patron and as a Weimar Minister of State. They met at the door of the lecture hall and went out into the street together. Schiller, who had been wanting to come into closer contact with Goethe for a long time, used the opportunity to begin a conversation. He opened with a comment on the lecture they had just heard, saying that such a piecemeal way of handling nature could not bring the layman any real satisfaction. Goethe, to whom this remark was heartily welcome, replied that such a style of scientific observation ‘was uncanny even for the initiated, and that there must certainly be another way altogether, which did not treat of nature as divided and in pieces, but presented her as working and alive, striving out of the whole into the parts’.