Translations:Benutzer:Arian/Klett-Mini-Test/1269/en

Thinking in polarities is a key to understanding evolution. It formally constitutes the character of Goethe's way of beholding nature; he works it out exemplarily in his *Metamorphosis of Plants*. As a man of the eye, Goethe anchored his research in what is visible of the plant as above-ground form; its underground portion, the root, remained out of sight. When one brings the latter in — one must, through an act of abstraction, make the invisible visible by freeing the root from the earth — the polarity of root and blossom becomes perceptible to the beholding eye. The primal unity of the plant is split, within the earthly realm, into two poles. What connects them in a mercurial way is the leaf sequence carried upward along the stem. The leaf makes the middle between the poles sense-perceptible. When this threefoldness is taken to a higher stage, the form of the plant appears as a wholeness that, in the blossom, most purely becomes the image of its being.