Page:History of botany (Sachs; Garnsey).djvu/178

 regard a particular leaf-form as first in time, and that others proceeded from it by change; he uses the word metamorphosis in a purely ideal sense. At other times his remarks may be interpreted as though he really considered the normal ascending metamorphosis to be a real change in the organs, arising from a transmutation of the species. With this confusion of notion and thing, idea and reality, subjective conception and objective existence, Goethe took up exactly the position of the so-called nature-philosophy.

Goethe's doctrine could only make its way to logical consistency and clearness of thought by deciding for the one or the other way; he must either assume that the different leaf-forms, which were regarded as alike only in the idea, were really produced by change of a previous form,—a conception that at once presupposes a change of species in time; or he must entirely adopt the position of the idealistic philosophy, in which idea and reality coincide. In this case the assumption of a change in time was not necessary; the metamorphosis remained an ideal one, a mere mode of view; the word leaf then signifies only an ideal fundamental form from which the different forms of leaves actually observed may be derived, as De Candolle's constant species from an ideal type.

If now we read Goethe's further remarks on the doctrine of metamorphosis attentively, we perceive that he really arrived at neither of these conclusions, but perpetually vacillated between the two; a number of his sayings might be collected, which might be taken for precursors of a theory of descent, as they have been taken by some modern writers; but it is quite as easy to make a selection which would carry us back to the position of the ideal philosophy and the constancy of species. In the later years of his life the idea of a physical metamorphosis accomplished in time, and involving a change of species, does appear more distinctly in Goethe's writings. This