ed form,
_Bildung_ or form change. He saw that _Gestalt_ was but a momentary
phase of _Bildung_, and could be considered apart and in itself only
by an abstraction fatal to all understanding of the living thing.
Mephistopheles scoffs at the scholars who would explain a living
creature by anatomising it:

"Dann hat er die Theile in seiner Hand,
Fehlt leider! nur das geistige Band."[83]

Goethe kept clear of this mistake; he knew that the artist comes
nearer to the truth than the analyst.

In the fragment entitled _Bildung und Umbildung organischer Naturen_
(1807), introductory to a reprint of his paper on the "Metamorphosis
of Plants," we get an exposition of his general views on living
things. He points out there how we try to understand things by
separating them into their parts. We can, it is true, resolve the
organism into its structural elements, but we cannot recompose it or
endow it with life by joining up the parts. Hence we require some
other means of understanding it. "In all ages even among scientific
men there can be discerned a yearning to apprehend the living form as
such, to grasp the connection of their external visible parts, to
interpret them as indications of the inner activity, and so, in a
certain measure, to master the whole conceptually." This science which
should discover the inner meaning of organic _Bildung_ is called
Morphology.[84] In Morphology we should not speak of _Gestalt_ or fixed
form, or if we do we should understand by it only a momentary phase of
_Bildung_. Form is of interest not in itself but only as the
manifestation of the inner activity of the living being. Over
development, he says elsewhere, there presides a formative force, a
_bildende Kraft_ or _Bildungstrieb_, which works out the idea of the
organism. Living things, in his view of them, strive to manifest an
idea. They are Nature's works of art--and so, incidentally, they
require an artist to interpret them.

This profound conception of the nature of life is applied not only to
the growing changing individual but also to the whole changing world
of organisms. They are all manifestations of a living shaping power
which moulds them. This shaping power, immanent in all life, is
conceived to work according to a general plan, and so we get an
explanation of the fact that living things seem simply varieties of
one common type.

"If we once recognise," says Goethe, "that the creative spirit brings
into being and shapes