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By virtue of his pictorial-dynamic way of regarding nature, Ruskin was quite clear that the scientists’ one-sided seeking after external forces and the mathematically calculable interplay between them can never lead to a comprehension of life in nature. For in such a search man loses sight of the real signature of life: form as a dynamic element. Accordingly, in his Ethics of the Dust, Ruskin does not answer the question: ‘What is Life?’ with a scientific explanation, but with the laconic injunction: ‘Always stand by Form against Force.’ This he later enlarges pictorially in the words: ‘Discern the moulding hand of the potter commanding the clay from the merely beating foot as it turns the wheel.’ (Lect. X.)

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Before entering into a further description of Howard’s system, we must make clear why we disregard the fact that modern meteorology has developed the scale of cloud-formation far beyond Howard, and why we shall keep to his own fourfold scale.

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Seeing, therefore, how it became a question for Goethe, at the very beginning of his scientific studies, whether a natural classification of nature’s phenomena could be achieved, we can understand why he was so overjoyed when, towards the end of his life, in a field of observation which had meanwhile caught much of his interest, he met with a classification which showed, down to the single names employed, that it had been read off from reality.

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The reason why Goethe laid so much stress on Howard’s terminology was because he was very much aware of the power of names to help or hinder men in their quest for knowledge. He himself usually waited a long time before deciding on a name for a natural phenomenon or a connexion between phenomena which he had discovered. The Idea which his spiritual eye had observed had first to appear so clearly before him that he could clothe it in a thought-form proper to it. Seeing in the act of name – giving an essential function of man (we are reminded of what in this respect the biblical story of creation says of Adam),9 Goethe called man ‘the first conversation which Nature conducts with God’.

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In thus opposing form and force to each other, Ruskin is actually referring to two kinds of forces. There exist those forces which resemble the potter’s foot in producing mere numerically regulated movements (so that this part of the potter’s activity can be replaced by a power-machine), and others, which like the potter’s hand, strive for a certain end and so in the process create definite forms. Ruskin goes a step further still in The Queen of the Air, where he speaks of selective order as a mark of the spirit:

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It is characteristic of Goethe that, on becoming acquainted with Howard’s work, he at once gave a warning against subdividing his scale without limit. Goethe foresaw that the attempt to insert too many transitory forms between Howard’s chief types would result only in obscuring that view of the essentials which Howard’s original classification had opened up. Obviously, for a science based on mere onlooking there is no objection to breaking up an established system into ever more subdivisions in order to keep it in line with an increasingly detailed outer observation. This, indeed, modern meteorology has done with Howard’s system, with the result that, to-day, the total scale is made up of ten different stages of cloud-formation.

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The following is a comprehensive description of Goethe’s meteorological views, which he gave a few years before his death in one of his conversations with his secretary, Eckermann:

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It is characteristic of Goethe that he did not content himself with knowing the truth which someone had brought forward in a field of knowledge in which he himself was interested, but that he felt his acquaintance with this truth to be complete only when he also knew something about the personality of the man himself. So he introduces his account of his endeavours to know more about Howard, the man, with the following words: ‘Increasingly convinced that everything occurring through man should be regarded in an ethical sense, and that moral value is to be estimated only from a man’s way of life, I asked a friend in London to find out if possible something about Howard’s life, if only the simplest facts.’ Goethe was uncertain whether the Englishman was still alive, so his delight and surprise were considerable when from Howard himself he received an answer in the form of a short autobiographical sketch, which fully confirmed his expectations regarding Howard’s ethical personality.

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‘It does not merely crystallize indefinite masses, but it gives to limited portions of matter the power of gathering, selectively, other elements proper to them, and binding these elements into their own peculiar and adopted form. …

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Valuable as this tenfold scale may be for certain practical purposes, it must be ignored by one who realizes that through Howard’s fourfold scale nature herself speaks to man’s intuitive judgment. Let us, therefore, turn to Howard’s discovery, undisturbed by the extension to which modern meteorology has subjected it.