contemplation of the human heart--this
most mobile, most mutable and fickle part of the creation--to the
observation of (granite) the oldest, firmest, deepest, most immovable
son of nature. For all natural things are in connection with each
other." It was his life's task to search for the links of this coherence
in order to find that unity which he knew to be in the moral as well as
material universe.

From those "first and most solid beginnings of our existence" he turned
to the history of plants and to the anatomy of the animals which cover
this crust of the earth. The study of Spinoza confirmed him in the
direction thus taken. "There I am on and under the mountains, seeking
the divine _in herbis et lapidibus_," says he, in Spinoza's own words;
and again: "Pardon me if I like to remain silent when people speak of a
divine being which I can know only in _rebus singularibus_." This
pantheistic view grew stronger and stronger with years; but it became a
pantheism very different from that of Parmenides, for whom being and
thinking are one, or from that of Giordano Bruno, which rests on the
analogy of a universal soul with the human soul, or even from that of
Spinoza himself, which takes its start from the relations of the
physical world with the conceptive world, and of both with the divine
one. Goethe's pantheism always tends to discover the cohesion of the
members of nature, of which man is one: if once he has discovered this
universal unity, where there are no gaps in space nor leaps in time, he
need not search further for the divine.

It is analogy which helps us to form these intuitive or platonic ideas.
It was through analogy that Goethe arrived at his great discoveries in
natural science, and I only repeat what such men as Johannes Mueller,
Baer, and Helmholtz have been willing to acknowledge, when I say that
the poet's eye has been as keen as that of any naturalist. Kant had
contended that there might be a superior intelligence, which, contrary
to human intelligence, goes from the general to the particular; and
Goethe thought--he proved, I might say--that in man too some of this
divine intelligence can operate and shine, if only in isolated sparks.
It was a spark of this kind which, first at Padua on the sight of a
fanpalm-tree, then again, on the eve of his departure from Palermo,
during a walk in the public garden amid the Southern vegetation,
revealed to him the law of the metamorphosis of plants. He found an