We chose the transformation of leaf forms into one another as the starting-point of our observations, because the principle of metamorphosis appears here in a most conspicuous manner. This principle, however, is not confined to this part of the plant's organism. In fact, all the different organs which the plant produces within its life cycle - foliage, calyx, corolla, organs of fertilization, fruit and seed - are metamorphoses of one and the same organ.

In the fully developed plant this rhythm repeats itself three times in succession and at ever higher levels, so that the plant, in climbing from stage to stage, each time goes through a process of withdrawal before appearing at the next. The greater the creative power required at a certain stage, the more nearly complete must be the withdrawal from outer appearance. This is why the most extreme withdrawal of the plant into the state of being takes place in the seed, when the plant prepares itself for its transition from one generation to another. Even earlier, the flower stands towards the leaves as something like a new generation springing from the small organ of the calyx, as does the fruit to the flower when it arises from the tiny organs of reproduction. In the end, however, nothing appears outwardly so unlike the actual plant as the little seed which, at the expense of all appearance, has the power to renew the whole cycle.

It has struck biologists of Goethe's own and later times that contrary to their method he did not build up his study of the plant by starting with its lowest form, and so the reproach has been levelled against him of having unduly neglected the latter. Because of this, the views he had come to were regarded as scientifically unfounded. Goethe's note-books prove that there is no justification for such a reproach. He was in actual fact deeply interested in the lower plants, but he realized that they could not contribute anything fundamental to the spiritual image of the plant as such which he was seeking to attain. To understand the plant he found himself obliged to pay special attention to examples in which it came to its most perfect expression. For what was hidden in the alga was made manifest in the rose. To demand of Goethe that in accordance with ordinary science he should have explained nature 'from below upwards' is to misunderstand the methodological basis of all his investigations.

Thus Goethe found himself led to ideas regarding the male and female principles in the plant, which were the exact opposite of those one obtains if, in trying to explain the process of pollination, one does not keep to the plant itself but imports an analogy from another kingdom of nature. For in continuance of the vertical principle of the plant, the pistil and carpel represent the male aspect in the process of spiritual anastomosis, and the mobile, wind- or insect-borne pollen, in continuing the spiral principle, represents the female part.

Once again he felt that Schiller and he were 'spiritual antipodes, removed from each other by more than an earth diameter'. However, Goethe restrained his rising annoyance, and answered Schiller in a tranquil but determined manner: 'I am glad to have ideas without knowing it, and to see them with my very eyes.'

⁵ Goethe also describes a proliferated pink.

Goethe started from the conviction that our senses as well as our intellect are gifts of nature, and that, if at any given moment they prove incapable through their collaboration of solving a riddle of nature, we must ask her to help us to develop this collaboration adequately. Thus there was no question for him of any restriction of sense-perception in order to bring the latter in line with the existing power of the intellect, but rather to learn to make an ever fuller use of the senses and to bring our intellect into line with what they tell. 'The senses do not deceive, but the judgment deceives', is one of his basic utterances concerning their respective roles in our quest for knowledge and understanding. As to the senses themselves, he was sure that 'the human being is adequately equipped for all true earthly requirements if he trusts his senses, and so develops them as to make them worthy of trust'.

Man has long learnt to make use of this law of metamorphosis in the plant for what is called doubling the flower of a certain species. Such a flower crowds many additional petals within its original circle, and these petals are nothing but metamorphosed stamens; this, for instance, is the difference between the wild and the cultivated rose. The multitude of petals in the latter is obtained by the transformation of a number of the former's innumerable stamens. (Note the intermediate stages between the two, often found inside the flower of such plants.)

Through studying the plant in this way Goethe grew aware also of the significance of the nodes and eyes which the plant develops as points where its vital energy is specially concentrated; not only the seed, but the eye also, is capable of producing a new, complete plant. In each of these eyes, formed in the axils of the leaves, the power of the plant is present in its entirety, very much as in each single seed.

Seen with Goethe's eyes, the plant kingdom as a whole appears to be a single mighty plant. In it the ur-plant, while pressing into appearance, is seen to observe the very rule which we have found governing its action in the single plant - that of repeated expansion and contraction.⁷ Taking the tree in the sense already indicated, as the state of highest expansion along the ur-plant's way of entering into spatial manifestation, we note that tree-formation occurs successively at four different levels - as fern-tree (also the extinct tree-form of the horsetail) among the cryptogams, as coniferous tree among the gymnosperms, as palm-tree among the monocotyledons, and lastly in the form of the manifold species of the leaf-trees at the highest level of the plant kingdom, the dicotyledons. All these levels have come successively into existence, as geological research has shown; the ur-plant achieved these various tree-formations successively, thus giving up again its state of expansion each time after having reached it at a particular level.