their youth.' The nucleus of their new creed was
contained in their first belief; but it had been
developed into a system of social views more in
harmony with society and its exigencies, of aesthe-
tic opinions more independent of reality and its
accidents, of philosophical ideas more speculative
and methodical. In other words, Goethe and
Schiller never ceased to believe as they had done
at twenty, that all vital creations in nature as in
society are the result of growth and organic
development, not of intentional, self-conscious
planning, and that individuals on their part act
powerfully only through their nature in its en-



GENERAL VIEW ON NATURE AND MAN. 175

tiretj, not through one faculty alone, such as
reason or will, separated from instinct, imagina-
tion, temperament, passion, etc. Only they came
to the conviction that there existed general laws
which presided over organic development, and
that there was a means of furthering in the
individual the harmony between temperament,
character, understanding, and imagination, with-
out sacrificing one to the others. Hence they
shaped for themselves a general view of Nature
and Mankind, Society and History, which may
not have become the permanent view of the whole
nation ; but which for a time was predominant,
which even now is still held by many, and which
in some respects will always be the ideal of the
best men in Germany, even when circumstances
have wrought a change in the intellectual and
social conditions of their country, so as to necessi-
tate a total transformation and accommodation
of those views.

We cannot regard it merely as the natural
effect of advancing years, if Goethe and Schiller
modified and cleared their views ; if Kant, whose
great emancipating act, the ' Critic of Pure Reason,'
falls chronologically in the preceding period (1781),
corrected what seemed to him too absolute in his



176 GOETHEj KANT, AND SCHILLER.

system, and reconstructed from the basis of the
conscience that metaphysical world which he had
destroyed by his analysis of the intellect. The
world just then was undergoing profound changes.
The great ' Philosopher King ' had descended to
the tomb (178G), and with him the absolute
libertj"^ of thought, which had reigned for forty-
six years. The French Eevolution, after having
exalted all generous souls, and seemingly con-
firmed the triumph of liberty and justice which
the generation had witnessed in America, took a
direction and drifted into excesses which unde-
ceived, sobered, and saddened even the most
hopeful believers. As regards personal circum-
stances, the Italian journey of Goethe (1786-1788)
and his scientific investigations into nature, the
study of Kant's new philosophy to which Schiller
submitted his undisciplined mind (1790 and 1791),
were the high-schools out of which their genius
came strengthened and purified, although their
aesthetic and moral doctrines did not remain quite
unimpaired by them. I shall endeavour to give an
idea of this double process and its results at the risk
of being still more abstract and dry than before.'

' For the following pages on Goethe, see his 'Wilhelm
Meister,' especially the sixth book, and ' Bildung und Umbildung



ART AND NATURE. 177

Man is the last and liighest linlc in Nature ;

Lis task is to understand what she aims Q^gthe's

at in liim and then to fulfil her inten- moral ^

tions. This view of Herder's was Goethe's '"""^'P ***•

starting-point in the formation of his Weltan-
schauung or general view of things.



All the woi-ld (says one of the characters in ' Wilhelm
Meister ' ) lies before us, like a vast quarry before the
architect. He does not deserve the name, if he does not
compose with these accidental natural materials an image
whose soux'ce is in his mind, and if he does not do it with
the greatest possible economy, solidity, and perfection. All
that we find outside of us, nay, within us, is object-matter ;
but deep within us lives also a power capable of giving an
ideal form to this matter. This creative power allows
U3 no rest till we have produced that ideal form in one
or the other way, either without us in finished woi-ks, or
in our own life.

Here we already have in germ Schiller's idea
that life ought to be a work of art. But how do
we achieve this task, continually impeded as we are
by circumstances and by our fellow-creatures, who
will not always leave us in peace to develop our
individual characters in perfect conformity with

organischer Naturen,' particularly 'Gescliichte meines Botan-
ischeu btudiams ' (vol. xxxvi. of the ' Works ').



178 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLER.

nature? In our relations with our neighbour,
Goethe (like Lessing and Wieland, Kant and
Herder, and all the great men of his and the pre-
ceding age, in England and France as well as in
Germany) recommended absolute toleration not
only of opinions, but also of individualities, par-
ticularly those in which Nature manifests herself
' undefiled.' As to circumstances, which is only
another name for Fate, he preached and practised
resignation. At every turn of our life, in fact,
we meet with limits ; our intelligence has its
frontiers which bar its way ; our senses are limited,
and can only embrace an infinitely small part of
nature ; few of our wishes can be fulfilled ; pri-
vation and sufferings await us at every moment.
' Privation is thy lot, privation ! That is the
eternal song which resounds at every moment,
which, our whole life through, each hour sings
hoarsely to our ears ! ' laments Faust. What
remains then for man ? ' Everything cries to us
that we must resign ourselves.' 'There are few
men, however, who, conscious of the privations
and sufferings in store for them in life, and desirous
to avoid the necessity of resigning themselves
anew in each particular case, have the courage to
perform the act of resignation once for all ; ' who



Goethe's moral principles. 179

say to themselves that there are eternal and neces-
sary laws to which we must submit, and that we
had better do it without grumbling ; who ' en-
deavour to form principles which are not liable to
be destroyed, but are rather confirmed by contact
with reality.' In other words, when man has
discovered the laws of nature, both moral and
physical, he must accept them as the limits of his
actions and desires ; he must not wish for eternity
of life or inexhaustible capacities of enjoyment,
understanding, and acting, any more than he
wishes for the moon. For rebellion against these
laws must needs be an act of impotency as well as
of deceptive folly. By resignation, on the contrary,
serene resignation, the human soul is purified ;
for thereby it becomes free of selfish passions and
arrives at that intellectual superiority in which
the contemplation and understanding of things
give sufficient contentment, without making it
needful for man to stretch out his hands to take
possession of them : a thought which Goethe's
friend, Schiller, has magnificently developed in
his grand philosophical poems. Optimism and
pessimism disappear at once as well as fatalism ;
the highest and most refined intellect again accepts
the world, as children and ignorant toilers do, as

N 2



180 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLER.

a given necessity. He does not even think the

world could be otherwise, and within its limits he

not only enjoys and suffers, but also works gaily,

trying, like Horace, to subject things to himself,

but resiofned to submit to them, when thev are

invincible. Thus the simple Hellenic existence

which, contrary to Christianity, but according to

nature, accepted the present without ceaselessly

thinking of death and another world, and acted

in that precent and in the circumstances allotted

to each by fate, without wanting to overstep the

boundaries of nature, would revive again in our

modern world and free us for ever from the torment

of unaccomplished wishes and of vain terrors.

The sojourn in Italy, during which Goethe

lived outside the struggle for life, outside the

competition and contact of practical
Goethe's . . .

view of activity, m the contemplation or nature

Nature. ^ , . .

and art, developed this view — the spec-
tator's view, which will always be that of the
artist and of the thinker, strongly opposed to that
of the actor on the stage of human life. ' Iphi-
genia,' ' Torquato Tasso,' * Wilhelm Meister ' are
the fruits and the interpreters of this conception of
the moral world. What ripened and perfected it,
30 as to raise it into a general view, not only of



Goethe's method. 181

morality, but also of the great philosopliical
questions which man is called upon to answer,
was his study of nature, greatly furthered during
his stay in Italy. The problem which lay at the
bottom of all the vague longing of his generation
for nature he was to solve. It became his inces-
sant endeavour to understand the coherence and
unity oi nature.

You are for ever searching for what is necessary in
nature (Schiller wrote to him once), but you search for
it by the most difficult way. You take the whole of
natui'e in oider to obtain light on the particular case ; you
look into the totality for the explanation of the individual
existence. From the simplest organism (in nature), you
ascend step by step to the more complicated, and finally
construct the most complicated of all, man, out of the
materials of the whole of nature. In thus creatmg man
anew under the guidance of nature, you penetrate into his
mysterious organism.

And, indeed, as there is a wonderful harmony
with nature in Goethe, the poet and the man, so
there is the same harmony in Goethe, the savant
and the thinker ; nay, even science he practised
as a poet. As one of the greatest physicists of
our days, Helmholtz, has said of him : * He did
not try to translate nature into abstract concep-
tions, but takes it as a complete work ot art, which



182 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLER.

must reveal its contents spontaneouslj to an
intelligent observer.' Goethe never became a
thorough experimentalist ; he did not want ' to
extort the secret from nature by pumps and re-
torts.' He waited patiently for a voluntary revela-
tion, i.e. until he could surprise that secret by an
intuitive glance ; for it Avas his conviction that
if you live intimatel}^ with Nature, she will sooner
or later disclose her mysteries to you. If you read
his ' Songs,' his ' Werther,' his ' Wahlverwandt-
schaften,' jo\i feel that extraordinary intimacy —
I had almost said identification — with nature, pre-
sent everywhere. Werther's love springs up with
the blossom of all nature ; he begins to sink and
iiears his self-made tomb, while autumn, the death
of nature, is in the fields and woods. So does
the moon spread her mellow light over his garden,
as 'the mild eye of a true friend over his destiny.'
Kever was there a poet who humanised nature or
naturalised hnman feeling, if I might say so, to
the same degree as Goethe. Now, this same love
of nature he brought into his scientific researches.
He began his studies of nature early, and he
began them as he was to fi.nisn them, with geology.
BufFon's great views on the revolutions of the earth
had made a deep impression upon him, although



Goethe's view of a'ature. 183

lie was to end as tlie declared adversai-y of that
vulcanisni which we can trace already at the
bottom ofBuffon's theory — naturally enough, when
we thiuk how uncongenial all violence in society'
and nature was to him, how he looked everywhere
for slow, uninterrupted evolution. From theo-
retical study he had early turned to direct obser-
vation ; and when his administrative functions
obliged him to survey the mines of the little
Dukedom, ample opportunit}- was offered for
positive studies. As early as 1778, in a paper on
Granite, he wrote : ' I do not fear the reproach
that a spirit of contradiction draws me from the
contemplation of the human heart — this most
mobile, most mutable and fickle part of the creation
— to the observation of (granite) the oldest, firmest,
deepest, most immovable son of Nature. For all
natural things are in connexion with each other.'
It was his life's task to search for the links of this
coherence in order to find that unity, which he
knew to be in the moral as well as material uni-
verse.

From those ' first and most solid beginnings of
our existence,' he turned to the history of plants
and to the anatomy of the animals which cover
this crust of the earth. The study of Spinoza



184 GOETHE, KANT, AKD SCHILLEE.

confirmed liim in the direction thus taken. * There
I am on and under the mountains, seeking the
divine in herhis et laindibus,' says he, in Spinoza's
own words ; and again : ' Pardon me, if I like to
remain silent, when people speak of a divine being
which I can know only in rehus singularibvs.' This
pantheistic view grew stronger and stronger with
years ; but it became a pantheism very different
from that of Parmenides, for whom being and
thinking are one, or from that of Giordano Bruno,
which rests on the analog-y of a universal soul
with the human soul, or even from that of Spinoza
himself, which takes its start from the relations of
the physical world witli the conceptive world, and
of both with the divine one. Goethe's pantheism
always tends to discover the cohesion of the
members of nature, of which man is one : if once
he has discovered this universal unity, where there
are no gaps in space, nor leaps in time, lie need
not search further for the divine.

Nature ! We live in it and remain strangers to it.
It continvially talks to us and does not betray its secret.
It seems to have planned everything with a view to indi-
viduality, and does not care for individuals. It lives only
by continual birth, and the mother is indiscernible.
Nature has thought, and does not cease to think ; but it



Goethe's view of nature. 1S5

thinks, not as man does, but as Nature. It loves itself
and is ever centred on itself with innumerable eyes and
hearts. It has multiplied itself in order to enjoy itself
a hundredfold. It is ever creating new enjoyers, never
tired of communicating itself. Life is its most beautiful
invention, and death its artifice for having much life.

This idea it was which was afterwards meta-
physically developed by Schelling and Hegel ; but
metaphysics are not what we are now studying-.
Even when I shall have to speak by and by of
Kant, who entirely changed the basis of all specu-
lative thought, I shall leave aside his philosophy
proper as much as possible, and try only to speak
of his way of looking at life and history. Goethe's
view of life, which he won through the study of
nature, and which consists in trying to seize the
unity of nature in the constant climax of its
phenomena up to the highest, the intellectual
phenomenon, man, — differs from all former similar
views in this, that it considers the coherence of the
universe as a process in time, a history in which
or through which nature becomes conscious of
itself, not as a connection by links in space only.
This is the point where Herder's influence is most
percej)tible, and which was to be brought into a
system by the methodical and dialectical specula-



186 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLEE.

tions of Hegel, whom we may consider as the great
summariser of all the intellectual work done by
Germany during the sixty or seventy years with
which we are occupied.

By what means was this process, this history,
which Goethe discerned in the coherence of nature,
to be discovered and understood ? By the means
of the very same organ of intuition which the
whole generation of Herder and Goethe had recog-
nised in their youth as the highest of poetical
faculties, and which Kant himself had admitted
to be the distinctive quality of the poet. Others,
we have seen and shall further see, applied this
faculty to history. Goethe applied it to nature.
His poet's eye revealed to him the mystery of
nature's laws ; but he was not content with such
divination. He became a patient and conscien-
tious observer, and did not rest until he had, as it
were, proved his sum. Now, this method has re-
mained the dominant one in Germany, and has
misled thinkers more than once, when they applied
it without controlling it by the inductive method.
The aberrations and excrescences of Schelling's
philosophy of Nature are in everybody's memory ;
and the best things done in natural science, even
in Germany, have been done by adversaries of



Goethe's view of nature. 187

Scbelling's school and adherents of the mechanical
principle of explanation. Nevertheless the in-
tuitive method has been wonderfully fertile even
for natural science, and I remember how often
Liebig himself told mo that all his discoveries had
been the result of lightning-like intuition and
divination, ascertained afterwards by observation
and experiment. As for historical sciences, the
conquests made by the intuitive method are
nncontested. It has taught the world that the
knowledge of laws — that is to say, the most ab-
stract and unreal kind of knowledge — is by no
means alone valuable ; that causality, to which
the savants of our dav would again limit all
science, is not its sole object; that the intuitive
knowledge of typical forms — in other words, of
platonic ideas — which we acquire by the careful
observation of individual and particular phenomena,
has equally its value; for it allows us to form ideas
of things, which always remain the same through
all the changes of the phenomena, and neverthe-
less do not exist in reality.

It is analogy which helps us to form these
intuitive or platonic ideas. It was through
analogy that Goethe arrived at his great dis-
coveries in natural science, and I only repeat



]88 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLER.

what swch men as Johannes Miiller, Baer, and
Hehnholtz have been willing to acknowledge,
when I say that the poet's eye has been as keen as
that of any naturalist. Kant had contended that
there might be a superior Intelligence, which,
contrary to human intelligence, goes from the
general to the particular ; and Goethe thought —
he proved, I might say — that in man too some of
this divine intelligence can operate and shine, if
only in isolated sparks. It was a spark of this
kind which, first at Padua on the sight of a fan-
palm tree, then again, on the eve of his departure
from Palermo, during a walk in the public garden
amidst the southern vegetation, revealed to him
the law of the metamorphosis of plants. He found
an analogy between the difierent parts of the same
plant which seemed to repeat themselves : unity
and evolution were revealed to him at once.

Three years later the sight of a half-broken
sheep-skull, which he found by chance on the
sand of the Venetian Lido, taught him that the
same law, as he had suspected, applied also to
vertebrate animals, and that the skull might be
considered as a series of strongly modified ver-
tebrae. He had, in fact, already hinted at the
principle, shortly after put forward by Lamarck,



Goethe's view op nature. 189

and long afterwards developed and firmly established
by Darwin. He considered the difference in the
anatomical structure of animal species as modi-
fications of a type or planned structure, modi-
fications brought about by the difference of life,
food, and dwellings. He had discovered as early
as 1 786 the intermaxillary bone in man, i.e. the
remnant of a part which had had to be adapted
to the exigencies of the changed structure ; and
proved thereby that there had been a primitive
similarity of structure, which had been trans-
formed by development of some parts, and
atrophy of others. Goethe's sketch of an ' In-
troduction into Comparative Anatomy,' which
he wrote in 1795, urged by A. von Humboldt,
has remained, if I may believe those competent to
judge, a fundamental stone of modern science.
And, I may be allowed, as I am unversed in such
matters, to invoke the authority of one of the most
eminent living physiologists, Helmholtz, who says
of Goethe's anatomical essay, that in it the poet

.... teaclies, with the greatest clearness and decision,
that all differences in the structure of animal species are to
be considered as changes of one fundamental type, which
have been brought about by fusion, transformation, ag-
grandiiiement, diminution, or total annihilation of several



190 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLER.

parts. This has, indeed, become, in the present state of
comparative anatomy, the leading idea of this science. It
has never since been expressed better or more clearly than
by Goethe : and after-times have made few essential
modifications.'

Now, the same may be said, I am told, in spite
of some differences as to details, of Ms metamor-
phosis of plants. I do not mean by this to say
that Goethe is the real author of the theory of
evolution. There is between him and Mr. Darwin
the difference which there is between Vico and
Niebuhr, Herder and F. A. Wolf. In the one case
we have a fertile hint, in the other a well-
established system, worked out by proofs and
convincing arguments. Nevertheless, when a
man like Johannes Miiller sees in Goethe's views
' the presentiment of a distant ideal of natural
history,' we may be allowed to see in Goethe one
of the fathers of the doctrine of evolution, which,
after all, is only an application of Herder's prin-
ciple oi fieri to the material world.

After having thus gone through the whole
series of organisms, from the simplest to the most
complicated, Goethe finds that he has laid, as it
were, the last crowning stone of the universal

1 Written in 1853, five years before the appearance of Mr,
Darwin's great work.



Goethe's philosophic views. 191

pyramid, raised from the materials of the whole
quarry of nature ; that he has reconstructed man.
And here begins a new domain ; for after

Goethe's

all for mankind the highest study must be philosophic

views.

man himself. The social problems of
property, education, marriage, occupied Goethe's
mind all his life through, although more parti-
cularly in the last thirty years. The relations of
man with nature, the question how far he is free
from the laws of necessity, how far subject to them,
are always haunting him. If you read the ' Wahl-
verwandtschaften,' the ' Wanderjahre,' the second
' Faust,' you will find those grave questions ap-
proached from all sides. I shall not, however,
enter here into an exposition of Goethe's political,
social, and educational views, not only because
they mostly belong to a later period, but especially
because they have never found a wide echo, nor
determined the opinions of an important portion
of the nation, nor entered as integrating principles
into its lay creed. Not so with the metaphysical
conclusion which he reached by this path, and
which is somewhat different from the pantheism of
his youth, inasmuch as he combines with it some-
what of the fundamental ideas of Leibnitz, which
were also Lessing's, and which, after all, form a



»
192 GOETHE, KANT, AND SCHILLER.

sort of return to Christianity, as understood in its
widest sense, in the sense in which it harmonises
with Plato's idealism. ' Tliiuking is not to be
severed from what is thought, nor will from move-
ment.' Nature consequently is God, and God is
nature, but in this God-Nature man lives as an
imperishable monad, capable of going through
thousands of metamorphoses, but destined to rest
on each stage of this unlimited existence, in full
possession of the present, in which he has to ex-
pand his whole being by action or enjoyment.
This conception of life was not, as you will see,
the creation of an imagination longing to pass
beyond the conditions of human existence — which
is the idealism of the ' general '— but the highest
result of the poet's insight into the order of nature.
Here we mark the great contrast with the
later Kant, the contrast between a view which
sees in man one link in the chain of nature, and
the view which takes man out of the order of
nature and makes him a member of a higher
invisible order. This contrast has filled up the
intellectual history of Germany ever since Herder
opened hostilities against the master of his youth.
In vain Fichte, Scheiling, Hegel gave themselves
out to be the disciples of Kant ; in reality they



Goethe's philosophic Views. 193

â– were only the sophists, who, with the weapons of
Kant's dialecticism, carried ad ahsurdum the main
idea of Herder and Goethe, the German idea, Kar^
s^o-^rjv, according to which nature is immanent in