vincing arguments. Nevertheless, when a man like Johannes Mueller
sees in Goethe's views "the presentiment of a distant ideal of natural
history," we may be allowed to see in Goethe one of the fathers of the
doctrine of evolution, which, after all, is only an application of
Herder's principle of _fieri_ to the material world.

After having thus gone through the whole series of organisms, from the
simplest to the most complicated, Goethe finds that he has laid, as it
were the last crowning stone of the universal pyramid, raised from the
materials of the whole quarry of nature; that he has reconstructed man.
And here begins a new domain; for after all for mankind the _highest_
study must be man himself. The social problems of property, education,
marriage, occupied Goethe's mind all his life through, although more
particularly in the last thirty years. The relations of man with nature,
the question how far he is free from the laws of necessity, how far
subject to them, are always haunting him. If you read the
_Wahlverwandtschaften_, the _Wanderjahre_, the second _Faust_, you will
find those grave questions approached from all sides. I shall not,
however, enter here into an exposition of Goethe's political, social,
and educational views, not only because they mostly belong to a later
period, but especially because they have never found a wide echo, nor
determined the opinions of an important portion of the nation, nor
entered as integrating principles into its lay creed. Not so with the
metaphysical conclusion which he reached by this path, and which is
somewhat different from the pantheism of his youth, inasmuch as he
combines with it somewhat of the fundamental ideas of Leibnitz, which
were also Lessing's, and which, after all, form a sort of return to
Christianity, as understood in its widest sense, in the sense in which
it harmonizes with Plato's idealism. "Thinking is not to be severed from
what is thought, nor will from movement." Nature consequently is God,
and God is nature, but in this God-nature man lives as an imperishable
monad, capable of going through thousands of metamorphoses, but destined
to rest on each stage of this unlimited existence, in full possession of
the present, in which he has to expand his whole being by action or
enjoyment. This conception of life was not, as you will see, the
creation of an imagination longing to pass beyond the conditions of
human existence--which is the idealism of the "gen