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
vertebrae. 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 fix