Goethe's Conception of the World
GA 6
IX. Thoughts Concerning the Evolutionary History of the Earth
[ 1 ] Goethe's connection with the Ilmenau mine stimulated his observations of the kingdom of minerals, stones and rocks as well as the superimposed strata of the earth's crust. In July, 1776, he accompanied Duke Carl August to Ilmenau. The object of their journey was to see whether the old mine could be put into use again. Goethe gave further attention to this matter of the mine, and as a result he felt more and more the desire to know how Nature proceeds in the formation of stony and mountainous masses. He climbed high summits and crept into clefts in the earth in order “to discover the nearest traces of the great shaping hand.” He told Frau von Stein of his joy at learning to know creative Nature from this side also, writing from Ilmenau, 8th September, 1780: “I am now living with body and soul in stone and mountains and am overjoyed at the wide perspectives opening out before me. These last two days have revealed to me a new territory and may lead to important results. The world has now assumed for me a new, a gigantic aspect.” More and more there established itself in him the hope that he would succeed in spinning a thread which could lead through subterranean labyrinths and afford perspective amid the confusion. (Letter to Frau von Stein, 12th June, 1784.) Goethe gradually extended his observations over wider regions of the earth's surface. He believed that his travels in the Harz mountains had afforded him the knowledge of how great, inorganic masses were formed. He ascribes to these inorganic masses the tendency “to break in various directions, so that parallelepipeds arise which in their turn have the tendency to split diagonally” (Cp. The Formation of large Inorganic Masses. Kürschner. Nat. Lit. Bd. 34.). He thinks of the stony masses as being interwoven by an ideal, six-sided trellis-work. Cubic, parallelepiped, rhombic, rhomboidal, columnar and laminated bodies are thereby formed out of a basic mass. He conceives of forces at work within the basic mass which separate it in the way illustrated by this ideal trellis-work. Goethe seeks this active idea in the kingdom of stone as well as in organic Nature. Here also he investigates with the eye of the spirit. Where this separation into regular forms does not actually appear he conceives of it as existing ideally in the masses. On a journey to the Harz mountains which he undertook in 1784, he asks Councillor Kraus, who accompanied him, to execute chalk drawings in which the invisible ideal is elucidated and made perceptible through the visible. He is of the opinion that the real can only be truly represented by the draughtsman if he heeds the intentions of Nature, which do not often appear sufficiently clearly in the external phenomenon.
“In the transition from the soft to the solid state, this separation occurs, which either affects the entire mass or else is confined to its inner parts” (Essay on Mountain Formation: General and Specific. Kürschner, Nat. Lit. Bd. 34.). According to Goethe's view a sensible-supersensible archetype is livingly present in the organic forms; an ideal element enters into the sensible perception and permeates it. In the regular formation of inorganic masses, however, there is working an idea which does not enter the sensible form as such, but nevertheless creates a sensible form. The inorganic form is not sensible-supersensible in its appearance, but only sensible; it must, however, be understood as the effect of a supersensible force. The inorganic form is a transition between the inorganic process, the course of which is still dominated by an idea although it receives from the idea no finished form, and the organic process in which the idea itself becomes sensible form.
[ 2 ] Goethe thinks that the formation of compound rocks is brought about by the substances, which originally existed ideally in a mass only, becoming actually separated from each other. In a letter to Leonhard, 25th November, 1807, he writes: “Thus I willingly admit that I often perceive simultaneous operations where others see only a succession. In many a rock which others regard as a conglomerate, as a heap of fragments gathered and cemented together, I think I see a rock, divided and broken out of a heterogeneous mass, and then held firmly together by consolidation.”
[ 3 ] Goethe did not succeed in making these thoughts fruitful in regard to a large number of inorganic forms. It is in accordance with his mode of thinking to explain the arrangement of geological strata out of ideal formative principles which inhere in substances according to their nature. He could not agree with the geological views of Werner, which were very general at that time, because Werner did not recognise any such formative principles, but traced everything back to the purely mechanical action of water. Still more alien to Goethe was the Plutonic theory brought forward by Hutton, and maintained by Alexander von Humboldt, Leopold von Buch, and others, which explained the development of separate earth periods by revolutions brought about by material causes. According to this conception, great mountain systems may suddenly shoot up from out of the earth as the result of volcanic forces. Such colossal accomplishments of force seemed to Goethe contrary to Nature. He saw no reason why the laws of earthly evolution should suddenly change at certain times, and after a long period of graded activity should burst out through processes of “heaving, pressing, rolling, crushing, hurling and flinging.” Nature appeared to him consistent in all her parts, so that even a God could make no change in the laws innate in her. He regarded Nature's laws as unchangeable. The forces active to-day in the formation of the earth's surface must have worked at all times.
[ 4 ] This point of view leads him to a natural conception of the way in which the masses of rock distributed in the neighbourhood of the Lake of Geneva have come into position, and which, to judge by their constitution, have been separated off from distant mountains. He was confronted by the opinion that these rocks had been thrown into their present position by the tumultuous rise of mountains lying far off. Goethe tried to discover forces which can be observed to-day and which are able to explain this phenomenon. He found such forces active in the formulation of glaciers. He only had now to assume that the glaciers, which to-day still move rock from mountains into the plains, were once immeasurably greater in extent than at present. At that time they removed rocks much further from the mountains than at present. As the glaciers receded these rocks were left behind. Goethe thought that the granite blocks lying around in the lowlands of North Germany must have reached their present abode in an analogous way. In order to imagine that the regions covered by these erratic masses were once covered by glacier-ice, he had to assume the existence of an epoch of intense cold. This assumption became the common property of science through Agassiz, who arrived at it independently, and in 1837 laid it before the Swiss Society for Natural Research. In recent times, this cold epoch which broke over the continents of the earth after a rich animal and plant life had already developed, has become the pet study of eminent geologists. The details which Goethe brings forward concerning the phenomena of this “Ice Age” are unimportant in the face of observations made by later investigators.
[ 5 ] Just as Goethe was led by his general view of Nature to the assumption of an epoch of intense cold, so he was led to a correct view of the nature of fossils. It is true that earlier thinkers had already recognised, in these formations, relics of organisms of former ages. This correct view, however, was so long in becoming general that we find Voltaire still regarding the petrified shell-fish as freaks of Nature. After some experience in this sphere Goethe soon recognised that the petrified remains of organisms stand in a natural connection with the strata in which they are found. That means that these organisms lived in the epochs of the earth in which the corresponding strata were formed. He speaks about fossils in this sense in a letter to Merck, 27th October, 1782: “I am fully convinced that all the bony fragments of which you speak, and which are found everywhere in the upper sand of the earth, originate in the most recent epoch, but this, compared with our ordinary reckoning of time, is very ancient. In this epoch the sea had already receded; on the other hand streams still flowed in broad beds, yet comparatively at the level of the sea, not faster and perhaps not even so fast as now. At the same time the sand, mixed with lime, was deposited in all broad valleys, which gradually, as the sea sank, were forsaken by the water, the rivers digging only small beds in the middle of them. At that time the elephant and the rhinoceros had their home with us on the barren mountains, and their remains could easily have been washed down by the woodland streams into those great river valleys or lake plains where, permeated with rocky sediment, they were preserved to a greater or less degree and where we now dig them up with the plough, or accidentally in some way. I said before that in this way one finds them in the upper sand, that is to say in the sand that has been swept together by other rivers when the main crust of the earth was already fully formed. The time will soon come when fossils will no longer be mixed up together but will be classified in accordance with the corresponding epochs of the world.”
[ 6 ] Goethe has often been called a precursor of the Geology founded by Lyell. Geology no longer assumes mighty revolutions or catastrophes in order to explain the origin of one earth period out of the other. It traces former changes of the earth's surface back to the same processes still occurring to-day. We must not, however, ignore the fact that modern geology applies merely physical and chemical forces to explain the formation of the earth. Goethe, on the contrary, assumes formative forces operative within the rocks, and which represent a type of formative principles higher than those recognised by physics and chemistry.
Gedanken über die Entwicklungsgeschichte der Erde
[ 1 ] Durch seine Beschäftigung mit dem Ilmenauer Bergbau wurde Goethe angeregt, das Reich der Mineralien, Gesteine und Felsarten, sowie die übereinander geschichteten Massen der Erdrinde zu betrachten. Im Juli 1776 begleitete er den Herzog Karl August nach Ilmenau. Sie wollten sehen, ob das alte Bergwerk wieder in Bewegung gesetzt werden könne. Goethe widmete dieser Bergwerksangelegenheit auch weiter seine Fürsorge. Dabei wuchs in ihm immer mehr der Trieb, zu erkennen, wie die Natur bei der Bildung der Stein- und Gebirgsmassen verfährt. Er bestieg die hohen Gipfel und kroch in die Tiefen der Erde, um «der großen formenden Hand nächste Spuren zu entdecken». Seine Freude, die schaffende Natur auch von dieser Seite kennen zu lernen, teilte er am 8. September 1780 von Ilmenau aus der Frau von Stein mit. «Jetzt leb' ich mit Leib und Seel in Stein und Bergen und bin sehr vergnügt über die weiten Aussichten, die sich mir auftun. Diese zwei letzten Tage haben mir ein groß Fleck erobert und können auf vieles schließen. Die Welt kriegt mir nun ein neu ungeheuer Ansehen.» Immer mehr befestigt sich bei ihm die Hoffnung, daß es ihm gelingen werde, einen Faden zu spinnen, der durch die unterirdischen Labyrinthe durchführen und eine Übersicht in der Verwirrung geben könne. (Brief an Frau von Stein vom 12. Juni 1784.) Allmählich dehnt er seine Beobachtungen über weitere Gebiete der Erdoberfläche aus. Auf seinen Harzreisen glaubt er zu erkennen, wie sich große anorganische Massen gestalten. Er schreibt ihnen die Tendenz zu, sich, «in mannigfachen, regelmäßigen Richtungen zu trennen so daß Parallelepipeden entstehen, welche wieder in der Diagonale sich zu durchschneiden die Geneigtheit haben.» (Vergl. den Aufsatz «Gestaltung großer anorganischer Massen», Kürschner, Band 34.) Er denkt sich die Steinmassen von einem ideellen Gitterwerk durchzogen, und zwar sechsseitig. Dadurch werden kubische, parallelepipedische, rhombische, rhomboidische, säulen- und plattenförmige Körper aus einer Grundmasse herausgeschnitten. Er stellt sich innerhalb dieser Grundmasse Kräftewirkungen vor, die sie in dem Sinne trennen, wie das ideelle Gitterwerk es veranschaulicht. Wie in der organischen Natur, so sucht Goethe auch in dem Steinreiche das wirksame Ideelle. Auch hier forscht er mit Geistesaugen. Wo die Trennung in regelmäßige Formen nicht in die Erscheinung tritt, da nimmt er an, daß sie ideell in den Massen vorhanden ist. Auf einer Harzreise, die er 1784 unternimmt, läßt er von dem ihn begleitenden Rat Kraus Kreidezeichnungen ausführen, in denen das Unsichtbare, Ideelle durch das Sichtbare verdeutlicht und zur Anschauung gebracht ist. Er ist der Ansicht, daß das Tatsächliche vom Zeichner nur dann wahrhaft dargestellt werden kann, wenn dieser auf die Intentionen der Natur achtet, die in der äußeren Erscheinung oft nicht deutlich genug hervortreten.«... im Übergang aus dem Weichen in das Starre ergibt sich eine Scheidung, sie sei nun dem Ganzen angehörig oder sie ereigne sich im Innersten der Massen.» (Kürschner, Band 34. Aufsatz: «Gebirgs-Gestaltung im ganzen und einzelnen.») In den organischen Formen ist, nach Goethes Ansicht, ein sinnlich-übersinnliches Urbild lebendig gegenwärtig; ein Ideelles tritt in die sinnliche Wahrnehmung ein und durchsetzt sie. In der regelmäßigen Gestaltung anorganischer Massen wirkt ein Ideelles, das als solches nicht in die sinnliche Form eingeht, aber doch eine sinnliche Form schafft. Die unorganische Form ist in der Erscheinung nicht sinnlich-übersinnlich, sondern nur sinnlich; sie muß aber als Wirkung einer übersinnlichen Kraft aufgefaßt werden. Sie ist ein Zwischending zwischen dem unorganischen Vorgang, dessen Verlauf noch von einem Ideellen beherrscht wird, der aber von demselben eine geschlossene Form erhält, und dem Organischen, in dem das Idelle selbst zur sinnlichen Form wird.
[ 2 ] Die Bildung zusammengesetzter Gesteine denkt sich Goethe dadurch bewirkt, daß die ursprünglich nur ideell in einer Masse vorhandenen Substanzen tatsächlich auseinander getrennt werden. In einem Briefe an Leonhard, vom 25. November 1807, schreibt er: «So gestehe ich gern, daß ich da noch oft simultane Wirkungen erblicke, wo andere schon eine sukzessive sehen; daß ich in manchem Gestein, das andere für ein Konglomerat, für ein aus Trümmern Zusammengeführtes und Zusammengebackenes halten, ein aus einer heterogenen Masse in sich selbst Geschiedenes und Getrenntes und sodann durch Konsolidation Festgehaltenes zu schauen glaube.»
[ 3 ] Goethe ist nicht dazu gekommen, diese Gedanken für eine größere Zahl unorganischer Formenbildungen fruchtbar zu machen. Es ist seiner Denkweise gemäß, auch die Anordnung der geologischen Schichten aus ideellen Bildungsprinzipien zu erklären, die dem Stoff, seinem Wesen nach, innewohnen. Den damals weit verbreiteten geologischen Ansichten Werners konnte er sich aus dem Grunde nicht anschließen, weil dieser solche Bildungsprinzipien nicht kannte, sondern alles auf die rein mechanischen Wirkungen des Wassers zurückführte. Noch unsympathischer war ihm der von Hutton aufgestellte und von Alexander von Humboldt, Leopold von Buch und anderen verteidigte Vulkanismus, der die Entwicklung der einzelnen Erdperioden durch gewaltsame, von materiellen Ursachen bewirkte Revolutionen erklärte. Durch vulkanische Kräfte läßt diese Anschauung große Gebirgssysteme plötzlich aus der Erde emporschießen. Solche unermeßliche Kraftleistungen schienen Goethe dem Wesen der Natur zu widersprechen. Er sah keinen Grund, warum die Gesetze der Erdentwicklung sich zu gewissen Zeiten plötzlich ändern und nach langandauernder allmählicher Wirksamkeit sich in einem gewissen Zeitpunkte durch «Heben und Drängen, Aufwälzen und Quetschen, Schleudern und Schmeißen» äußern sollen. Die Natur erschien ihm in allen ihren Teilen konsequent, so daß selbst eine Gottheit an den ihr eingeborenen Gesetzen nichts ändern könnte. Ihre Gesetze hält er für unwandelbar. Die Kräfte, die heute an der Bildung der Erdoberfläche wirken, müssen dem Wesen nach, zu allen Zeiten gewirkt haben.
[ 4 ] Von diesem Gesichtspunkte aus kommt er auch zu einer naturgemäßen Ansicht darüber, auf welche Weise die Gesteinblöcke an ihre Plätze gelangt sind, die in der Nähe des Genfer Sees zerstreut sich vorfinden und die, ihrer Beschaffenheit nach, von weit entfernten Gebirgen abgetrennt sind. Es trat ihm die Meinung entgegen, daß diese Gesteinsmassen bei dem tumultarischen Aufstand der weit rückwärts im Lande gelegenen Gebirge an ihren jetzigen Ort geschleudert worden seien. Goethe suchte nach Kräften, die gegenwärtig beobachtet werden können, und die geeignet sind, diese Erscheinung zu erklären. Er fand solche bei der Bildung der Gletscher tätig. Nun brauchte er nur anzunehmen, daß die Gletscher, die heute noch das Gestein vom Gebirge in die Ebenen befördern, einstmals eine ungeheuer viel größere Ausdehnung gehabt haben als gegenwärtig. Sie haben dann die Steinmassen viel weiter von den Gebirgen weggetragen, als sie es in der Gegenwart tun. Als die Gletscher wieder an Ausdehnung verloren, sind diese Gesteine liegen geblieben. In analoger Weise, dachte Goethe, müssen auch die in der norddeutschen Tiefebene umherliegenden Granitblöcke an ihre jetzigen Fundorte gelangt sein. Um sich vorstellen zu können, daß die von erratischen Blöcken bedeckten Landesteile einst von Gletschereis bedeckt waren, bedarf es der Annahme einer Epoche großer Kälte. Gemeingut der Wissenschaft wurde diese Annahme durch Agassiz, der selbständig auf sie kam und sie 1837 in der Schweizerischen Gesellschaft für Naturforschung darlegte. In neuerer Zeit ist diese Kälteepoche, die über die Kontinente der Erde hereinbrach, als bereits ein reiches Tier- und Pflanzenleben entwickelt war, zum Lieblingsstudium bedeutender Geologen geworden. Was Goethe im einzelnen über die Erscheinungen dieser «Eiszeit» vorbringt, ist gegenüber den Beobachtungen, die spätere Forscher gemacht haben, belanglos.
[ 5 ] Ebenso wie zur Annahme einer Epoche großer Kälte wird Goethe durch seine allgemeine Naturanschauung zu einer richtigen Ansicht über das Wesen der Versteinerungen geführt. Zwar haben schon frühere Denker in diesen Gebilden Überreste vorweltlicher Organismen erkannt. Diese richtige Ansicht ist aber so langsam allgemein herrschend geworden, daß noch Voltaire die versteinerten Muscheln als Naturspiele ansehen konnte. Goethe erkannte bald, nachdem er einige Erfahrung auf diesem Gebiete gewonnen hatte, daß die Versteinerungen als Reste von Organismen in einem naturgemäßen Zusammenhange mit denjenigen Erdschichten stehen, in denen sie gefunden werden. Das heißt, daß diese Organismen in den Epochen der Erde gelebt haben, in denen sich die entsprechenden Schichten gebildet haben. In dieser Weise spricht er sich über Versteinerungen in einem Briefe an Merck vom 27. Oktober 1782 aus: «Alle die Knochentrümmer, von denen Du sprichst und die in dem oberen Sande des Erdreichs überall gefunden werden, sind, wie ich völlig überzeugt bin, aus der neuesten Epoche, welche aber doch gegen unsere gewöhnliche Zeitrechnung ungeheuer alt ist. In dieser war das Meer schon zurückgetreten; hingegen flossen Ströme noch in großer Breite, doch verhältnismäßig zum Niveau des Meeres, nicht schneller und vielleicht nicht einmal so schnell als jetzt. Zu derselbigen Zeit setzte sich der Sand, mit Leimen gemischt, in allen breiten Tälern nieder, die nach und nach, als das Meer sank, von dem Wasser verlassen wurden und die Flüsse sich in ihrer Mitte nur geringe Beete gruben. Zu jener Zeit waren die Elefanten und Rhinozerosse auf den entblößten Bergen bei uns zu Hause, und ihre Reste konnten gar leicht durch die Waldströme in jene großen Stromtäler oder Seeflächen heruntergespült werden, wo sie mehr oder weniger mit dem Steinsaft durchdrungen sich erhielten und wo wir sie nun mit dem Pfluge oder durch andere Zufälle ausgraben. In diesem Sinne sagte ich vorher, man finde sie in dem oberen Sande, nämlich in dem, der durch die alten Flüsse zusammengespült worden, da schon die Hauptrinde des Erdbodens völlig gebildet war. Es wird nun bald die Zeit kommen, wo man Versteinerungen nicht mehr durcheinander werfen, sondern verhältuismäßig zu den Epochen der Welt rangieren wird.»
[ 6 ] Goethe ist wiederholt ein Vorläufer der durch Lyell begründeten Geologie genannt worden. Auch diese nimmt nicht mehr gewaltsame Revolutionen oder Katastrophen an, um die Entstehung einer Erdperiode aus der andern zu erklären. Sie führt die früheren Veränderungen der Erdoberfläche auf dieselben Vorgänge zurück, die sich auch jetzt noch abspielen. Es darf aber nicht außer acht gelassen werden, daß die moderne Geologie bloß physikalische und chemische Kräfte heranzieht, um die Erdbildung zu erklären. Daß dagegen Goethe gestaltende Kräfte annimmt, die innerhalb der Massen wirksam sind und die eine höhere Art von Bildungsprinzipien darstellen, als die Physik und Chemie sie kennen.
Thoughts on the history of the earth's development
[ 1 ] Through his occupation with mining in Ilmenau, Goethe was inspired to consider the realm of minerals, rocks and rock types, as well as the layered masses of the earth's crust. In July 1776, he accompanied Duke Karl August to Ilmenau. They wanted to see if the old mine could be set in motion again. Goethe continued to devote his attention to this mining matter. At the same time, he was increasingly driven by the desire to see how nature works in the formation of rock and mountain masses. He climbed the high peaks and crawled into the depths of the earth to "discover the next traces of the great shaping hand". On September 8, 1780, he told Frau von Stein from Ilmenau of his joy at getting to know the creative side of nature. "Now I am living with body and soul in Stein and the mountains and am very happy about the wide vistas that open up to me. These last two days have conquered a great deal for me and can reveal much. The world now has a new and tremendous reputation for me." His hope that he would succeed in spinning a thread that could lead through the subterranean labyrinths and provide an overview in the confusion grew stronger and stronger. (Letter to Frau von Stein dated June 12, 1784.) He gradually extended his observations to other areas of the earth's surface. On his travels in the Harz Mountains, he believes he recognizes how large inorganic masses are formed. He ascribes to them the tendency "to separate in multiple, regular directions so that parallelepipeds arise, which again have the tendency to intersect diagonally." (Cf. the essay "Gestaltung großer anorganischer Massen", Kürschner, vol. 34.) He imagines the stone masses to be traversed by an ideal latticework, six-sided in fact. As a result, cubic, parallelepipedal, rhombic, rhomboid, columnar and plate-shaped bodies are cut out of a basic mass. He imagines the effects of forces within this basic mass that separate them in the same way as the ideal latticework illustrates. As in organic nature, Goethe also seeks the effective ideal in the realm of stone. Here, too, he investigates with the eyes of the mind. Where the separation into regular forms does not appear, he assumes that it is ideally present in the masses. On a trip to the Harz Mountains in 1784, he had Kraus, the councilor accompanying him, make chalk drawings in which the invisible, the ideal, is clarified and visualized by the visible. He is of the opinion that the actual can only be truly depicted by the draughtsman if he pays attention to the intentions of nature, which often do not emerge clearly enough in the external appearance."... in the transition from the soft to the rigid, a separation arises, whether it now belongs to the whole or whether it occurs in the innermost part of the masses." (Kürschner, vol. 34, essay: "Gebirgs-Gestaltung im ganzen und einzelnen.") In Goethe's view, a sensual-supersensible archetype is vividly present in the organic forms; an ideal enters into sensual perception and permeates it. In the regular shaping of inorganic masses, an ideal is at work, which as such does not enter into the sensuous form, but nevertheless creates a sensuous form. The inorganic form in its appearance is not sensuous-supersensuous, but only sensuous; however, it must be understood as the effect of a supersensuous force. It is an intermediate thing between the inorganic process, whose course is still dominated by an ideal, but which receives a closed form from it, and the organic, in which the ideal itself becomes the sensuous form.
[ 2 ] Goethe imagines the formation of composite rocks to be brought about by the fact that the substances originally present only ideally in a mass are actually separated. In a letter to Leonhard, dated November 25, 1807, he writes: "Thus I readily confess that I still often see simultaneous effects where others already see successive ones; that in many a rock which others regard as a conglomerate, as something brought together and baked together from debris, I believe I see something that has been separated and separated from a heterogeneous mass in itself and then held fast by consolidation."
[ 3 ] Goethe did not get around to making these thoughts fruitful for a larger number of inorganic formations. It is in keeping with his way of thinking to explain the arrangement of geological strata from ideal principles of formation that are inherent in the substance, in its essence. He could not subscribe to Werner's geological views, which were widespread at the time, because he did not know such principles of formation, but attributed everything to the purely mechanical effects of water. Even more unsympathetic to him was the volcanism put forward by Hutton and defended by Alexander von Humboldt, Leopold von Buch and others, which explained the development of the individual periods of the earth by violent revolutions brought about by material causes. According to this view, volcanic forces cause large mountain systems to suddenly shoot up from the earth. Such immense feats of strength seemed to Goethe to contradict the nature of nature. He saw no reason why the laws of the earth's development should suddenly change at certain times and, after a long period of gradual activity, express themselves at a certain point in time through "lifting and pushing, rolling up and squeezing, flinging and hurling". Nature appeared to him to be consistent in all its parts, so that even a deity could not change its innate laws. He considered its laws to be immutable. The forces that are at work today in the formation of the earth's surface must, in essence, have been at work at all times.
[ 4 ] From this point of view, he also arrives at a natural view of the way in which the blocks of rock have reached their places, which are scattered in the vicinity of Lake Geneva and which, according to their nature, are separated from distant mountains. He was confronted with the opinion that these masses of rock had been hurled to their present location during the tumultuous uprising of the mountains far back in the country. Goethe searched for forces that could be observed at the present time and that could explain this phenomenon. He found such forces at work in the formation of glaciers. Now he only had to assume that the glaciers, which today still carry the rock from the mountains to the plains, once had an enormously greater extent than at present. They then carried the masses of rock much further away from the mountains than they do today. When the glaciers lost their extent again, these rocks were left behind. Goethe thought that the granite blocks lying around in the North German Plain must have reached their present locations in a similar way. In order to imagine that the parts of the country covered by erratic blocks were once covered by glacial ice, it is necessary to assume an epoch of extreme cold. This assumption became common scientific knowledge through Agassiz, who came up with it independently and presented it to the Swiss Society for Natural Research in 1837. In more recent times, this cold epoch, which broke over the continents of the earth when a rich animal and plant life had already developed, has become the favorite study of important geologists. What Goethe says in detail about the phenomena of this "ice age" is irrelevant compared to the observations made by later researchers.
[ 5 ] Just as Goethe's general view of nature led him to a correct view of the nature of fossilization, it also led him to the assumption of an epoch of great cold. Earlier thinkers had already recognized the remains of pre-worldly organisms in these formations. But this correct view was so slow to become generally accepted that Voltaire was still able to regard fossilized shells as natural games. Goethe soon recognized, after he had gained some experience in this field, that the fossils, as remains of organisms, are in a natural connection with the layers of earth in which they are found. This means that these organisms lived in the epochs of the earth in which the corresponding layers were formed. He speaks in this way about fossils in a letter to Merck dated October 27, 1782: "All the bone debris of which you speak and which are found everywhere in the upper sands of the earth are, as I am completely convinced, from the latest epoch, which is, however, immensely old compared to our usual chronology. In this period the sea had already receded; however, rivers still flowed in great breadth, but in relation to the level of the sea, not faster and perhaps not even as fast as now. At that time the sand, mixed with clay, settled in all the broad valleys, which were gradually abandoned by the water as the sea receded, and the rivers dug only small beds in their midst. At that time the elephants and rhinoceroses were at home on the denuded mountains near us, and their remains could easily be washed down by the forest streams into those large river valleys or lake areas, where they were more or less imbued with the stone juice and where we now dig them up with the plow or by other coincidences. In this sense I said before that they are found in the upper sand, namely in that which was washed down by the old rivers, since the main crust of the soil had already been completely formed. The time will soon come when fossils will no longer be jumbled up, but will be arranged in relation to the epochs of the world."
[ 6 ] Goethe has repeatedly been called a forerunner of the geology founded by Lyell. This, too, no longer assumes violent revolutions or catastrophes to explain the formation of one earth period from another. It traces the earlier changes in the earth's surface back to the same processes that are still taking place today. However, it should not be ignored that modern geology only uses physical and chemical forces to explain the formation of the earth. Goethe, on the other hand, assumes formative forces that are active within the masses and that represent a higher kind of formation principles than those known to physics and chemistry.