*

Among the essays in which Goethe in later years gave out some of the
results of his scientific observation in axiomatic form, is one called
'Intuitive Judgment' ('Anschauende Urteilskraft'), in which he
maintains that he has achieved in practice what Kant had declared to be
for ever beyond the scope of the human mind. Goethe refers to a passage
in the Critique of Judgment, where Kant defines the limits of human
cognitional powers as he had observed them in his study of the peculiar
nature of the human reason. We must first go briefly into Kant's own
exposition of the matter.1

Kant distinguishes between two possible forms of reason, the
intellectus archetypus and the intellectus ectypus. By the first he
means a reason 'which being, not like ours, discursive, but intuitive,
proceeds from the synthetic universal (the intuition of the whole as
such) to the particular, that is, from the whole to the parts'.
According to Kant, such a reason lies outside human possibilities. In
contrast to it, the intellectus ectypus peculiar to man is restricted
to taking in through the senses the single details of the world as
such; with these it can certainly construct pictures of their
totalities, but these pictures never have more than a hypothetical
character and can claim no reality for themselves. Above all, it is not
given to such a thinking to think 'wholes' in such a way that through
an act of thought alone the single items contained in them can be
conceived as parts springing from them by necessity. (To illustrate
this, we may say that, according to Kant, we can certainly comprehend
the parts of an organism, say of a plant, and out of its components
make a picture of the plant as a whole; but we are not in a position to
think that 'whole' of the plant which conditions the existence of its