He sketched a hypothesis of the primitive plant, and the theory that all the organs of the plant are modifications and developments of the leaf. He was a friend of Etienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire, who defended “l’unité de composition organique” in the forms of nature, and evolution by gradual stages, and he was the vehement opponent of Cuvier, who attempted to pick the world to pieces according to strictly defined architectural plans and rigid classes. And what the inner impulse to all this was he has summed up in the motto to his “Morphology” from the verse in Job: Lo, he goeth by me, and I see him not; He is transformed, but I perceive him not. He further declares it in the introductory verse to his Osteology: Joyfully some years ago, Zealously my spirit sought To explore it all, and know How all nature lived and wrought: And ’tis ever One in all, Though in many ways made known; Small in great, and great in small, Each in manner of its own. Ever shifting, yet fast holding; Near and far, and far and near; So, with moulding and remoulding,— To my wonder I am here. In all this there is absolutely nothing of the characteristic mood and spirit of “exact” naturalism, with its mechanical and mathematical categories. It matters little that Goethe, when he thought of evolution, never had present to his mind the idea of Descent which is characteristic of “Darwinism,” but rather development in the lofty sense in which it is worked out in the nature-philosophy of Schelling and of Hegel. The chief point is, that to him nature was the all-living and ever-living, whose creating and governing cannot be reduced to prosaic numbers or mathematical formulæ, but are to be apprehended as a whole by the perceptions of genius rather than worked out by calculation or in detail. Any other way of regarding nature Goethe early and decisively rejected. And he has embodied his strong protest against it in his “Dichtung und Wahrheit”: “How hollow and empty it seemed to us in this melancholy, atheistical twilight.... Matter, we learnt, has moved from all eternity, and by means of this movement to right and left and in all directions, it has been able, unaided, to call forth all the infinite phenomena of existence.” The book—the “Système de la Nature”—“seemed to us so grey, so Cimmerian, so deathlike that it was with difficulty we could endure its presence.” And in a work with remarkable title and contents, “Die Farbenlehre,” Goethe has summed up his antagonism to the “Mathematicians,” and to their chief, Newton, the discoverer and founder of the new mathematical-mechanical view of nature. Yet the mode of looking at things which is here combated with so much labour, wit, and, in part, injustice, is precisely that of those who, to this day, swear by the name of Goethe with so much enthusiasm and so little intelligence The two Kinds of Naturalism.