Hooke, so Goethe would have argued, allowed the microscope to confuse his common sense. He would have seen in him an example confirming his verdict that he who fails to let the eye of the spirit work in union with the eye of the body 'risks seeing yet seeing past the thing'.

'Thus not through an extraordinary spiritual gift, not through momentary inspiration, unexpected and unique, but through consistent work did I eventually achieve such satisfactory results.' These words of Goethe - they occur in his essay, History of my Botanical Studies, which he wrote in later life as an account of his labours in this field of science - show how anxious he was that it should be rightly understood that the faculty of reading in the Book of Nature, as he knew it, was the result of a systematic training of his mind. It is important for our further studies to make clear to ourselves at this point the nature of the change which man must bring to pass within himself in order to brave Kant's 'adventure of reason'. Goethe's concept for the newly acquired faculty of cognition, exact sensorial fantasy, can give us the lead.

We remember that, to form this faculty, two existing functions of the soul, as such polarically opposite, had to be welded together - memory based on exact sense-perception and the freely working fantasy; one connected with the nervous system of the body, the other with the blood. We also know from earlier considerations (Chapter II) that in the little child there is not yet any such polarization, in body or soul, as there is in man's later life. Thus we see that training on Goethe's lines aims at nothing less than restoring within oneself a condition which is natural in early childhood.

In saying this we touch on the very foundations of the new pathway to science discovered by Goethe. We shall hear more of it in the following chapter.

¹ Critique of Judgment, II, 11, 27. Goethe chose the title of his essay so as to refute Kant by its very wording. Kant, through his inquiry into man's Urteilskraft, arrived at the conclusion that man is denied the power of Anschauung (intuition). Against this, Goethe puts his Anschauende Urteilskraft.

² 'Der Alte vom Königsberge' - a play upon words with the name of Kant's native town, Königsberg.

³ It is naturally to be expected that new light will also be thrown on the various realms of knowledge as such dealt with in these pages.

⁴ Delphinium, in particular, has the peculiarity (which it shares with a number of other species) that its calyx appears in the guise of a flower, whilst the actual flower is quite inconspicuous.

⁵ Goethe also describes a proliferated pink.

⁶ The terms 'primeval' or 'primordial' sometimes suggested for rendering the prefix 'ur' are unsuitable in a case like this. 'Primeval plant', for instance, used by some translators of Goethe, raises the misunderstanding - to which Goethe's concept has anyhow been subject from the side of scientific botany - that by his ur-plant he had in mind some primitive, prehistoric plant, the hypothetical ancestor in the Darwinian sense of the present-day plant kingdom.