He was sufficiently initiated into nature's methods to know that she
was not in need of a continuity of the stream of physical substance, in
the sense of the theory of inheritance, to guarantee a continuance of
the features of the species through successive generations, but that it
was her craft to achieve such continuance by means of physical
discontinuity.

*

Goethe was not temperamentally given to reflecting deliberately about
his own cognitional processes. Moreover, the excess of reflexion going
on around him in the intellectual life of his younger days inclined him
to guard himself with a certain anxiety against philosophical
cogitations. His words to a friend - 'Dear friend, I have done it well,
and never reflected about thinking' - bring this home to us. If in his
later years Goethe could become to some degree epistemologically
conscious of his spiritual achievements, as, for instance, his essay on
Intuitive Judgment shows, he owed this to his friendship with Schiller,
who became for him a kind of soul mirror, in which he could see the
reflexion of his own processes of consciousness. Indeed, at their first
personal encounter, significant as it was for their whole later
relationship, Schiller - though all unconsciously - performed a
decisive service of this kind for him. Goethe himself speaks of the
occasion in his essay Happy Encounter (Gliickliches Ereignis), written
twelve years after Schiller's death.

The occasion was, outwardly regarded, fortuitous: both men were leaving
a lecture on natural science at the University of Jena, Schiller having
been present as Professor of History in the University, and Goethe as
its patron and as a Weimar Minister of State. They met at the door of