Goethe: Well, What Do You Know!

In Italian Journey, Goethe mentions his quest to find evidence that all plants came from a single plant - a unifying theory. I even quoted a comment he made where he got off on a rabbit trail in Italy when he found the native plant species to be abundant and got excited about his unification theory and wasted a day when he could have been sight-seeing because he was preoccupied chasing an unsolvable problem.

Well, here's a quote from Charlotte Mason in volume 5, [page 357] indicating that he found some measure of success in that quest:

"His scientific interests remained with him to the end. He is allowed to have been in some respects a precursor of Darwin: he it was who discovered that all plant forms are modifications of the leaf, and arrived at the certainty that there must have been an original plant from which all plants were developed."

As I understand, scientists still hope to find a single substance that everything else comes from - whether it's energy, or matter or whatever. They think that everything originally came from one thing. It's kind of an elaboration of Goethe's original idea.


Here are the two relevant quotes from Goethe's Italian Journey that I blogged a few days ago:

"To wander about among a vegetation which is new to one is pleasant and instructive. It is the same with familiar plants as with other familiar objects: in the end we cease to think about them at all. But what is seeing without thinking? Here, when I am confronted with a great variety of plants, my hypothesis that it might be possible to derive all plant forms from one original plant becomes clearer to me and more exciting. Only when we have accepted this idea will it be possible to determine genera and species exactly. So far this has, I believe, been done in a very arbitrary way. At this stage in my botanical philosophy, I have reached an impasse, and I do not yet see how to get out of it. The whole subject seems to me to be profound and of far-reaching consequence."

Berating himself for allowing himself to get side-tracked from a scenic walk in order to solve the puzzle of finding the 'promal plant' from which all other plants came:
"Why are we moderns so distracted, why do we let ourselves be challenged by problems which we can neither face nor solve?"