Second Lecture

One can now elaborate further on what I am suggesting here as Goethe's particular process of cognition. This has been done in the aforementioned introductions to Goethe's scientific writings and also in my little book “Erkenntnistheorie der Goetheschen Weltanschauung” (Epistemology of Goethe's Worldview). But one thing may strike us here: Goethe described the metamorphosis of plants in an extraordinarily illuminating way with his thinking. He became a classical morphologist of the plant world. But although Goethe did not initially start from the plant world in his scientific studies of the organic world, but rather from the animal-human world, he nevertheless did not achieve the same perfection in his observation of the animal-human world as he did in his pursuit of the secrets of the plant world. It is perhaps well known, and can be read in my writings, how Goethe rebelled against the distinction that some anatomists and physiologists sought to establish between animals and humans by denying that humans have an intermaxillary bone in the upper jaw, whereas all animals have one. When he became aware of this, Goethe was not inclined to allow the difference between animality and humanity to be seen in such a minor detail. Goethe wanted to seek what elevated humans above animality in something quite different from such a detail. This led him to attempt to show that humans, like other animals, have an intermaxillary bone in the upper jaw. He did this in a classical manner, using all the scientific means available at the time to prove his point. And when Goethe then moved from the study of the animal-human to the study of plants and, I would say, incorporated this into the aforementioned extraordinarily significant treatise of 1790, he also had the idea of extending this view of metamorphosis to the animal world, that is, to that which not only lives like plants, but is also animated like animals.