should rather say that the animal is fashioned, after the Great
Architect's pattern, _to_ circumstances, and is only varied _by_
circumstances, and that within the narrowest limits of variability. For
the most that Goethe means by his "archetype" is an ideal pattern, after
which, or on which, a natural group of plants or animals has been
fashioned within the limits of possible variability. But by whose mind, or
rather within whose mind, was this ideal pattern--this essential
archetype--fashioned? Whence this ideal type, this natural group, this
_Archeus_ pervading all nature and fashioning all organic matter? Not from
the mind of Goethe certainly, nor from that of Aristotle or Lucretius, but
from the one supreme mind of the universe, in which the groups of all
living things were originally fashioned in the archetypal world--that
world "which," according to Bolingbroke, "contains intelligibly all that
is contained sensibly in our world."

This archetypal doctrine of Goethe, coupled, as he couples it, with the
influences of environment, or necessary external conditions, with typical
modifications only, while it entirely harmonizes with the Bible genesis of
types (everything modeled after its kind), is far from aiding, or in any
way abetting, the materialistic hypothesis of Haeckel, unless we make
nature at once the creator and modifier of her own archetype. And even
then the variability of species remains unaccounted for, except as we
attribute to nature a _purpose_ to modify persistent forms under a law
that is immutable even in its variability. For the assumption of an
archetype carries with it an archetypal plan and purpose, with a degree of
intelligence, either in or above nature, capable at once of conceiving the
type and determining the limits of its variability. The question is not,
therefore, as many may seem to think, whether species originate by miracle
or by law, but whether laws and causes can exist independently of any
predetermining will or agency in the universe.