In his History of my Botanical Studies Goethe mentions, besides Shakespeare and Spinoza, Linnaeus as one who had most influenced his own development. Concerning Linnaeus, however, this is to be understood in a negative sense. For when Goethe, himself searching for a way of bringing the confusing multiplicity of plant phenomena into a comprehensive system, met with the Linnaean system, he was, despite his admiration for the thoroughness and ingenuity of Linnaeus's work, repelled by his method. Thus by way of reaction, his thought was brought into its own creative movement: 'As I sought to take in his acute, ingenious analysis, his apt, appropriate, though often arbitrary laws, a cleft was set up in my inner nature: what he sought to hold forcibly apart could not but strive for union according to the inmost need of my own being.' Linnaeus's system agonized Goethe because it demanded from him 'to memorize a ready-made terminology, to hold in readiness a certain number of nouns and adjectives, so as to be able, whenever any form was in question, to employ them in apt and skilful selection, and so to give it its characteristic designation and appropriate position.' Such a procedure appeared to Goethe as a kind of mosaic, in which one ready-made piece is set next to another in order to produce out of a thousand details the semblance of a picture; and this was 'in a certain way repugnant' to him. What Goethe awoke to when he met Linnaeus's attempt at systematizing the plant kingdom was the old problem of whether the study of nature should proceed from the parts to the whole or from the whole to the parts. Seeing, therefore, how it became a question for Goethe, at the very beginning of his scientific studies, whether a natural classification of nature's phenomena could be achieved, we can understand why he was so overjoyed when, towards the end of his life, in a field of observation which had meanwhile caught much of his interest, he met with a classification which showed, down to the single names employed, that it had been read off from reality. * The following is a comprehensive description of Goethe's meteorological views, which he gave a few years before his death in one of his conversations with his secretary, Eckermann: