Wolff's case was to Goethe a symptom of the danger which he saw arising for science from the rapidly increasing use of the microscope (and similarly the telescope), if thinking was not developed correspondingly but left at the mercy of these instruments. His concern over the state of affairs speaks from his utterance: 'Microscopes and telescopes, in actual fact, confuse man's innate clarity of mind.' When we follow Goethe in this way he comes before us in characteristic contrast to Robert Hooke. We remember Hooke's microscopic 'proof of the unrelatedness of human thought to outer reality (Chapter III). There can be no doubt how Goethe, if the occasion had arisen, would have commented on Hooke's procedure. He would have pointed out that there would be no such thing as a knife with its line-like edge unless man were able to think the concept 'line', nor a needle with its point-like end unless he were able to think the concept 'point'. In fact, knife and needle are products of a human action which is guided by these two concepts respectively. As such they are embodiments, though more or less imperfect ones, of these concepts. Here too, therefore, just as Goethe had discovered it through his way of observing the plant, we see Ideas with our very eyes. What distinguishes objects of this kind from organic entities, such as the plant, is the different relationship between Object and Idea. Whereas in the case of an organism the Idea actively indwells the object, its relationship to a man-made thing (and similarly to nature's mineral entities) is a purely external one. Hooke, so Goethe would have argued, allowed the microscope to confuse his common sense. He would have seen in him an example confirming his verdict that he who fails to let the eye of the spirit work in union with the eye of the body 'risks seeing yet seeing past the thing'. * 'Thus not through an extraordinary spiritual gift, not through momentary inspiration, unexpected and unique, but through consistent work did I eventually achieve such satisfactory results.' These words of Goethe - they occur in his essay, History of my Botanical Studies, which he wrote in later life as an account of his labours in this field of science - show how anxious he was that it should be rightly understood that the faculty of reading in the Book of Nature, as he knew it, was the result of a systematic training of his mind. It is important for our further studies to make clear to ourselves at this point the nature of the change which man must bring to pass within himself in order to brave Kant's 'adventure of reason'. Goethe's concept for the newly acquired faculty of cognition, exact sensorial fantasy, can give us the lead.