components are united again. Out of the now complete seed a new and
complete plant can arise.

Goethe understood that he would be taught a correct conception of this
process only by the plant itself. Accordingly, he asked himself where
else in the growing plant something like separation and reunion could
be seen. This he found in the branching and reuniting of the veins in
the leaves, known as anastomosis.

In the dividing of the two growth-principles in the plant through the
formation of carpel and pistil, on the one hand, and the pollen-bearing
stamens on the other, and in their reunion through the coming together
of the pollen with the seed, Goethe recognized a metamorphosis of the
process of anastomosis at a higher level. His vision of it caused him
to term it 'spiritual anastomosis'.

Goethe held a lofty and comprehensive view of the significance of the
male and female principles as spiritual opposites in the cosmos. Among
the various manifestations of this polarity in earthly nature he found
one, but one only, in the duality of the sexes as characteristic of man
and animal. Nothing compelled him, therefore, to ascribe it in the same
form to the plant. This enabled him to discover how the plant bore the
same polarity in plant fashion.

In the neighbourhood of Weimar, Goethe often watched a vine slinging
its foliaged stem about the trunk and branches of an elm tree. In this
impressive sight nature offered him a picture of 'the female and male,
the one that needs and the one that gives, side by side in the vertical
and spiral directions'. Thus his artist's eye clearly detected in the
upward striving of the plant a decisively masculine principle, and in