The Invention of Nature

His favourite place, though, was his Garden House near the River Ilm, outside the old city walls on the duke’s estate. Just a ten-minute walk from his main residence, this small cosy house had been his first home in Weimar, but now it was his refuge where he withdrew from the continuous stream of visitors. Here he wrote, gardened or welcomed his most intimate friends. Vines and sweet-scented honeysuckle climbed along the walls and windows. There were vegetable plots, a meadow with fruit trees and a long path lined with Goethe’s beloved hollyhocks. When Goethe had first moved there in 1776, he had not only planted his own garden but had also convinced the duke to transform the castle’s formal baroque garden into a fashionable English landscape park where irregularly planted groves of trees gave a natural feel.

Goethe ‘was getting tired of the world’. The Reign of Terror in France had turned the initial idealism of the 1789 revolution into a bloody reality of mass executions of tens of thousands of so-called enemies of the revolution. This brutality, along with the ensuing violence that the Napoleonic Wars spread across Europe, had disillusioned Goethe, putting him in the ‘most melancholic mood’. As armies marched through Europe, he worried about the threats that faced Germany. He lived like a hermit, he said, and the only thing that kept him going was his scientific studies. Science for him was like a ‘plank in a shipwreck’.

Today Goethe is famed for his literary works but he was a passionate scientist too, fascinated by the formation of the earth as well as botany. He had a rock collection that eventually numbered 18,000 specimens. As Europe descended into war, he quietly worked on comparative anatomy and optics. In the year of Humboldt’s first visit, he established a botanical garden at the University of Jena. He wrote an essay, the Metamorphosis of Plants, in which he argued that there was an archetypal, or primordial, form underlying the world of plants. The idea was that each plant was the variation of such an urform. Behind variety was unity. According to Goethe, the leaf was this urform, the basic shape from which all others had developed – the petals, the calyx and so on. ‘Forwards and backwards the plant is always nothing but leaf,’ he said.

These were exciting ideas, but Goethe had no scientific sparring partner with whom to develop his theories. All that changed when he met Humboldt. It was as if Humboldt ignited the spark that had been missing for so long. When Goethe was with Humboldt, his mind worked in all directions. He pulled out old notebooks, books and drawings. Papers piled up on the table as they discussed botanical and zoological theories. They scribbled, sketched and read. Goethe was not interested in classification but in the forces that shaped animals and plants, he explained. He distinguished between the internal force – the urform – that provided the general form of a living organism and the environment – the external force – that shaped the organism itself. A seal, for example, had a body adapted to its sea habitat (the external force), Goethe said, but at the same time its skeleton displayed the same general pattern (the internal force) as those of land mammals. Like the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and later Charles Darwin, Goethe recognized that animals and plants adapted to their environment. The urform, he wrote, could be found in all living organisms in different stages of metamorphosis – even between animals and humans.

Listening to Goethe talk with such breathless enthusiasm about his scientific ideas, Humboldt advised him to publish his theories on comparative anatomy. And so Goethe began to work at a frenzied pace, spending the early morning hours dictating to an assistant in his bedroom. Still in bed, propped up on pillows and wrapped in blankets to keep out the cold, Goethe worked more intensely than he had for years. There wasn’t much time because by 10 a.m. Humboldt arrived and their discussions continued.

It was during this period that Goethe began to fling both his arms around whenever he went for a walk – provoking alarmed glances from his neighbours. He had discovered, he finally explained to a friend, that this exaggerated swinging of one’s arms was a remnant from the four-legged animal – and therefore one of the proofs that animals and humans had a common ancestor. ‘That’s how I walk more naturally,’ he said, and couldn’t have cared less if Weimar society regarded this rather strange behaviour as unrefined.