The Orphic Voice by Elizabeth Sewell

Author:Elizabeth Sewell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2022-05-03T00:00:00+00:00

In the Geschichte meines botanischen Studiums, immediately after the mention of the trinity of Spinoza, Shakespeare, and Linnaeus, Goethe goes on to discuss the latter’s system and his reaction to it:

Through sheer repetition the names imprinted themselves on my memory; in analysis too I acquired rather more skill, but the success was more apparent than real . . . Were I to try consciously to clear up my situation, I should say: think of me as a born poet, whose aim was to shape his words and forms of expression directly to fit his subject-matter, whatever that might be, in order to do it justice as far as possible. Such a one was now called upon to memorize a ready-made terminology, to have a squad of terms and sub-terms at the ready, so that when a specimen came his way he would be able, after some quick selective thinking, to line it up in its due order according to its particular characteristics. This way of going to work always reminded me of a sort of mosaic, where ready-made pieces are put together one by one so as ultimately to produce out of hundreds of petty details some semblance of a picture. The demands made by this method always went against my judgment.

Although I have come to see the necessity for this kind of thing, aiming as it does at enabling the student, by means of a general body of information, to come to terms with certain external characteristics of plants, and to do away with uncertainty about plantforms, yet I found that this would-be precise use of terms created the worst difficulty of all, plant organs being so versatile.

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