Translations:Manfred Klett: Von der Agrartechnologie zur Landbaukunst/1660/en

significance. Art, on the other hand, needs idea-images that fill the soul livingly and can grow within it. When one shapes these lived thought-pictures outward, the work of art arises — one that places itself beside nature, but does not imitate it; rather, in the spiritual grasping and experience of the idea of the archetypal image, the type, or the being, it seeks to recreate this artistically in image. Goethe sought, by way of the phenomena that the plant kingdom offers to the eye, after the primal phenomenon that underlies all plant formations in a spiritual sense. He grasped it, in the idea of the «Urpflanze» (archetypal plant), so concretely in spiritual-imaginative terms that he could say: «with this model [of the Urpflanze; author's note] and the key to it, one can then go on to invent plants to infinity, which must be consistent — that is, which, even if they do not exist, could exist, and are not merely painterly or poetic shadows and appearances, but have an inner truth and necessity. The same law will be extendable to all that lives.»