growths.

It has struck biologists of Goethe's own and later times that contrary
to their method he did not build up his study of the plant by starting
with its lowest form, and so the reproach has been levelled against him
of having unduly neglected the latter. Because of this, the views he
had come to were regarded as scientifically unfounded. Goethe's
note-books prove that there is no justification for such a reproach. He
was in actual fact deeply interested in the lower plants, but he
realized that they could not contribute anything fundamental to the
spiritual image of the plant as such which he was seeking to attain. To
understand the plant he found himself obliged to pay special attention
to examples in which it came to its most perfect expression. For what
was hidden in the alga was made manifest in the rose. To demand of
Goethe that in accordance with ordinary science he should have
explained nature 'from below upwards' is to misunderstand the
methodological basis of all his investigations.

Seen with Goethe's eyes, the plant kingdom as a whole appears to be a
single mighty plant. In it the ur-plant, while pressing into
appearance, is seen to observe the very rule which we have found
governing its action in the single plant - that of repeated expansion
and contraction.7 Taking the tree in the sense already indicated, as
the state of highest expansion along the ur-plant's way of entering
into spatial manifestation, we note that tree-formation occurs
successively at four different levels - as fern-tree (also the extinct
tree-form of the horsetail) among the cryptogams, as coniferous tree
among the gymnosperms, as palm-tree among the monocotyledons, and
lastly in the form of the manifold species of the leaf-trees at the
highest level of the plant kingdom, the dicotyledons. All these levels