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Man or Matter by Ernst Lehrs
page 93 of 488 (19%)
have come successively into existence, as geological research has
shown; the ur-plant achieved these various tree-formations
successively, thus giving up again its state of expansion each time
after having reached it at a particular level.

From the concept of the ur-plant Goethe soon learned to develop another
concept which was to express the spiritual principle working in a
particular plant species, just as the ur-plant was the spiritual
principle covering the plant kingdom as a whole. He called it the type.
In the manifold types which are thus seen active in the plant world we
meet offsprings, as it were, of the mother, the 'ur-plant', which in
them assumes differentiated modes of action.

The present part of our discussion may be concluded by the introduction
of a concept which Goethe formed for the organ of cognition attained
through contemplating nature in the state of becoming, as the plant had
taught him to do.

Let us look back once again on the way in which we first tried to build
up the picture of leaf metamorphosis. There we made use, first of all,
of exact sense-perceptions to which we applied the power of memory in
its function as their keeper. We then endeavoured to transform within
our mind the single memory pictures (leaf forms) into one another. By
doing so we applied to them the activity of mobile fantasy. In this way
we actually endowed, on the one hand, objective memory, which by nature
is static, with the dynamic properties of fantasy, and, on the other
hand, mobile fantasy, which by nature is subjective, with the objective
character of memory. Now, for the new organ of cognition arising from
the union of these two polar faculties of the soul, Goethe coined the
significant expression, exact sensorial fantasy.8 In terms of our
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