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'. 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. Howard's account of himself is known to us, as Goethe included a translation of it in the collection of his own meteorological studies. Howard in a modest yet dignified way describes his Christian faith, his guide through all his relationships, whether to other men or to nature.10 A man comes before us who, untroubled by the prevailing philosophy of his day, was able to advance to the knowledge of an objective truth in nature, because he had the ability to carry religious experience even into his observation of the sense-world. * In view of all this, it is perhaps not too much to say that in the meeting between Howard and Goethe by way of the spiritual bridge of the clouds, something happened that was more than a mere event in the personal history of these two men. 1 These words should be weighed with the fact in mind that they were written at the time when Crookes was intent on finding the unknown land of the spirit by means of just such 'a mere force of junction'. 2 See also Goethe's sketch of the basic cloud forms on Plate IV.