Second Lecture

If we now take a look at how Goethe approached this task, we will notice that he made many attempts to write a kind of metamorphosis of animal organs. He conducted an immeasurable number of studies in order to write such a metamorphosis of animals; but one will not find that any of these studies even remotely approaches what he had achieved with his metamorphosis of plants. And one can also see how Goethe repeatedly began to expand the theory of metamorphosis, at least in the field of osteology. But he always stopped before going any further. All these things remained fragments. He could not reach the point where his thinking, as an inner soul life, would have become so animated that it could also have submerged itself in animality, as in plant life and its transformations. And so, precisely in the study of Goethe, the great question arose about the nature and ways of human cognition in general, and here lies historically — at least for me — one of the roots of anthroposophy.