Читать книгу Form and Function - E. S. Russell - Страница 15

"Also bestimmt die Gestalt die Lebensweise des Thieres, Und die Weise zu leben, sie wirkt auf alle Gestalten Mächtig zurück."[79]

His best piece of purely morphological work was his theory of the metamorphosis of plants. Stripped of its vaguer elements, and of the crude attempt to explain differences in the character of plant organs by differences in the degree of "refinement" of the sap supplied to them, the theory is that stem-leaves, sepals, petals, and stamens are all identical members or appendages. These appendages differ from one another only in shape and in degree of expansion, stem-leaves being expanded, sepals contracted, petals expanded, and so on alternately. It is equally correct to call a stamen a contracted petal, and a petal an expanded stamen, for no one of the organs is the type of the others, but all equally are varieties of a single abstract plant-appendage.

What Goethe considered he had proved for the appendages of plants he extended to all living things. Every living thing is a complex of living independent beings, which "der Idee, der Anlage nach," are the same, but in appearance may be the same or similar, different or unlike.[80] Not only is there a primordial animal and a primordial plant, schematic forms to which all separate species are referable, but the parts of each are themselves units, which "der Idee nach," are identical inter se. This fantasy can hardly be taken seriously as a scientific theory; it seems, however, to have been what guided Goethe in his "discovery" of the vertebral nature of the skull. Just as the fore limb can be homologised with the hind limb, so, reasoning by analogy, the skull should be capable of being homologised with the vertebræ. To what ludicrous extremes this doctrine of the repetition of parts within the organism was pushed we shall see when we consider the theories of the German transcendentalists of the early nineteenth century.

Though Goethe's morphological views were lacking in definiteness he hit upon one or two ideas which proved useful. Thus he enunciated the "law of balance" long before Etienne Geoffroy St. Hilaire, the law "that to no part can anything be added, without something being taken away from another part, and vice versa."[81] He saw, too, what a help to the interpretation of adult structure the study of the embryo would be, for many bones which are fused in the adult are separate in the embryo.[82] This also was a point to which the later transcendentalists gave considerable attention.

So far we have spoken of Goethe as if he were merely the prophet of formal morphology; we have pointed out how he brought to clear expression the morphological principle implicit in the idea of unity of type, and how he seized upon some important guiding ideas, such as the principle of connections. But Goethe was not a formalist, and he was very far from the static conception of life which is at the base of pure morphology. His interest was not in Gestalt or fixed form, Bildung or form change. He saw that Gestalt was but a momentary phase of Bildung, and could be considered apart and in itself only by an abstraction fatal to all understanding of the living thing. Mephistopheles scoffs at the scholars who would explain a living creature by anatomising it:

"Dann hat er die Theile in seiner Hand,

Fehlt leider! nur das geistige Band."[83]

Goethe kept clear of this mistake; he knew that the artist comes nearer to the truth than the analyst.

In the fragment entitled Bildung und Umbildung organischer Naturen (1807), introductory to a reprint of his paper on the "Metamorphosis of Plants," we get an exposition of his general views on living things. He points out there how we try to understand things by separating them into their parts. We can, it is true, resolve the organism into its structural elements, but we cannot recompose it or endow it with life by joining up the parts. Hence we require some other means of understanding it. "In all ages even among scientific men there can be discerned a yearning to apprehend the living form as such, to grasp the connection of their external visible parts, to interpret them as indications of the inner activity, and so, in a certain measure, to master the whole conceptually." This science which should discover the inner meaning of organic Bildung is called Morphology.[84] In Morphology we should not speak of Gestalt or fixed form, or if we do we should understand by it only a momentary phase of Bildung. Form is of interest not in itself but only as the manifestation of the inner activity of the living being. Over development, he says elsewhere, there presides a formative force, a bildende Kraft or Bildungstrieb, which works out the idea of the organism. Living things, in his view of them, strive to manifest an idea. They are Nature's works of art—and so, incidentally, they require an artist to interpret them.

This profound conception of the nature of life is applied not only to the growing changing individual but also to the whole changing world of organisms. They are all manifestations of a living shaping power which moulds them. This shaping power, immanent in all life, is conceived to work according to a general plan, and so we get an explanation of the fact that living things seem simply varieties of one common type.

"If we once recognise," says Goethe, "that the creative spirit brings into being and shapes the evolution of the more perfect organic creatures according to a general scheme, is it altogether impossible to represent this original plan if not to the senses at least to the mind … ?"[85]

Such an interpretation of the unity of plan reaches perhaps beyond the bounds of science.

[70] See Kohlbrugge, "Hist. krit. Studien über Goethe als Naturforscher," Zool. Annalen. v., 1913, pp. 83–231.

[71] Or re-discovered, according to Kohlbrugge.

[72] Cotta ed., vol. ix., p. 448.

[73] "First Draft of a General Introduction to Comparative Anatomy."

[74] Cotta ed., ix., p. 463.

[75] Cotta ed., p. 478.

[76] Loc. cit., p. 491.

[77] Entwurf, Cotta ed., ix., p. 465.

[78] Geschichte der biologischen Theorien, i., p. 266.

[79] "So the form determines the manner of life of the animal, and the manner of life in its turn reacts powerfully upon all forms."

[80] Bildung und Umbildung organischer Naturen, 1807.

[81] Cotta ed., ix., p. 466.

[82] Loc. cit., pp. 474–5.

[83] Then he has all the parts within his hand, excepting only, sad to say, the living bond.

[84] Goethe was the inventor of the word.

[85] Cotta ed., ix., p. 490.