Schiller’s interest was at once aroused by this remark, although as a thorough Kantian he could not conceal his doubts whether the kind of thing indicated by Goethe was within human capacity. Goethe began to explain himself further, and so the discussion proceeded, until the speakers arrived at Schiller’s house. Quite absorbed in his description of plant metamorphosis, Goethe went in with Schiller and climbed the stairs to the latter’s study. Once there, he seized pen and paper from Schiller’s writing desk, and to bring his conception of the ur-plant vividly before his companion’s eyes he made ‘a symbolic plant appear with many a characteristic stroke of the pen’.