Internalism and Laws of Form 283
Academie des sciences. Geoffroy needed all the help he could get (and he would
later recruit other literary figures, including the novelists Balzac and George Sand,
to his cause as well). Cuvier, after all, was no ordinary opponent, and the subject of
their argument—the age-old dispute of formalism and functionalism—could not
have been more central to natural history.
Geoffroy, with good cause, viewed Goethe as the doyen and spiritual leader
of formalist morphology. Not only had Goethe coined the word "morphology," but
he had, long before, defended for plants the central proposition that Geoffroy
championed for animals as the starting point for his anatomical views—the
reduction of form to a single generating archetype (the leaf for Goethe, the vertebra
for Geoffroy). While the young Geoffroy worried about establishing a career and
surviving a revolution, Goethe was traveling in Italy and developing the theory of
his 1790 work, Versuch die Metamorphose der Pflanzen zu erkldren (Fig. 4-9).
(This work, little more than a pamphlet, consists of 123 numbered and almost
aphoristic paragraphs. I shall quote by number from the standard translation of
Mueller and Engard (1952). But I have read and own a copy of the original, which
I highly recommend to anyone who appreciates the fusion of great writing and
fascinating science.)
Goethe had been strongly interested in morphology throughout his life, and
his preferences had always tended towards formalism, particularly towards the
strongest version of the argument (and subject of this section)—the vision of a
single, generating archetypal form, setting both the bounds and the possibilities of
realized morphology. His two most famous forays into animal anatomy both rested
upon a formalist foundation: (1) his early support for the vertebral theory of the
skull, a conviction that he traced to 1791 when he examined "a battered sheep skull
from the sand of the dune like Jewish
4 - 8. A letter from Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire, written in January 1831 to a Mr. Payaud, with
Goethe featured in the penultimate paragraph. (Geoffroy presumably enclosed some writings of
Goethe along with this letter to Payaud.) The text of the paragraph reads as follows: "Goethe est
ci-joint. Sa bonhomie qui n'exclue pas la force et la justesse d'esprit, vous frappera." (Goethe is
enclosed. His good nature, which does not preclude strength and fairness of spirit, will strike
you.) (Author's collection.)