the lecture hall and went out into the street together. Schiller, who
had been wanting to come into closer contact with Goethe for a long
time, used the opportunity to begin a conversation. He opened with a
comment on the lecture they had just heard, saying that such a
piecemeal way of handling nature could not bring the layman any real
satisfaction. Goethe, to whom this remark was heartily welcome, replied
that such a style of scientific observation 'was uncanny even for the
initiated, and that there must certainly be another way altogether,
which did not treat of nature as divided and in pieces, but presented
her as working and alive, striving out of the whole into the parts'.

Schiller's interest was at once aroused by this remark, although as a
thorough Kantian he could not conceal his doubts whether the kind of
thing indicated by Goethe was within human capacity. Goethe began to
explain himself further, and so the discussion proceeded, until the
speakers arrived at Schiller's house. Quite absorbed in his description
of plant metamorphosis, Goethe went in with Schiller and climbed the
stairs to the latter's study. Once there, he seized pen and paper from
Schiller's writing desk, and to bring his conception of the ur-plant
vividly before his companion's eyes he made 'a symbolic plant appear
with many a characteristic stroke of the pen'.

Although Schiller had listened up to this point 'with great interest
and definite understanding', he shook his head as Goethe finished, and
said - Kantian that he was at that time: 'That is no experience, that
is an idea.' These words were very disappointing to Goethe. At once his
old antipathy towards Schiller rose up, an antipathy caused by much in
Schiller's public utterances which he had found distasteful.

Once again he felt that Schiller and he were 'spiritual antipodes,