Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/177

 really taken place. But we cannot reason in this way in the case of that which Goethe calls normal or ascending metamorphosis. When in a given species, which has remained constant with all its marks for countless generations, the cotyledons, the leaves, the bracts, and the parts of the flower are called leaves, this must be merely the result of abstraction, which has led to the generalising of the idea of a leaf; if we make abstraction of the physiological characters of the carpels, stamens, floral envelopes, and cotyledons, and regard only the way in which they originate on the stem, we are justified in including them in one general idea with ordinary leaves, and to this idea we quite arbitrarily give the name leaf. But this does not justify us in speaking of a change of these organs, so long as we consider the whole plant in question as a hereditary and constant form. For the plant therefore taken as constant the idea of metamorphosis has only a figurative meaning; the abstraction performed by the mind is transferred to the object itself, if we ascribe to it a metamorphosis which has really taken place only in our conception. The case would be different, if here as well as in the abnormal instances above-mentioned we could assume that the stamens and other organs of the plants lying before us were ordinary leaves in their progenitors. So long as this assumption of an actual change is not even hypothetically made, the expression change or metamorphosis is purely figurative, the metamorphosis is a mere 'idea.' This distinction Goethe has not made; he did not clearly see that his normal ascending metamorphosis can only have the meaning of a scientific fact, if a real change is assumed to take place in the course of propagation in this case, as in that of abnormal metamorphosis or misformation. A comparison of his various expressions shows that he took the word metamorphosis sometimes in its literal, sometimes in its ideal and figurative sense; for instance, he says expressly, 'We may say that a stamen is a folded petal, just as we may say that a petal is a stamen in a state of expansion.' This sentence shows that Goethe did not