well aware that he who aspires to recognize and to express in idea the
spirit which reveals itself through the phenomena of the sense-world
must develop the art of waiting - of waiting, however, in a way
intensely active, whereby one looks again and yet again, until what one
looks at begins to speak and the day at last dawns when, through
tireless 're-creation of an ever-creating nature', one has grown ripe
to express her secrets openly. Goethe was a master in this art of
active waiting.

* It was in the very year that Galvani, through his chance discovery,
opened the way to the overwhelming invasion of mankind by the purely
physical forces of nature, that Goethe came clearly to see that he had
achieved the goal of his labours. We can form some picture of the
decisive act in the drama of his seeking and finding from letters
written during the years 1785-7.

In the spring of 1785 he writes to a friend in a way that shows him
fully aware of his new method of studying nature, which he recognized
was a reading of her phenomena: 'I can't tell you how the Book of
Nature is becoming readable to me. My long practice in spelling has
helped me; it now suddenly works, and my quiet joy is inexpressible.'
Again in the summer of the following year: 'It is a growing aware of
the Form with which again and again nature plays, and, in playing,
brings forth manifold life.'

Then Goethe went on his famous journey to Italy which was to bear such
significant fruit for his inner life, both in art and in science. At
Michaelmas, 1786, he reports from his visit to the botanical garden in
Padua that 'the thought becomes more and more living that it may be
possible out of one form to develop all plant forms'. At this moment