ABSTRACT
In Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's view the question of the whole and of the parts is inseparable; one cannot be viewed without the other, and both must be seen as part of a process, in constant change, growth, death, rebirth. He was convinced that for this reason there was an intimate relationship between 'the demands of science' and 'the impulses of art and imitation'. The lasting achievement of Goethe's scientific work is also his earliest in the field of natural sciences: the discovery of the intermaxillary bone in human beings. Goethe is conventionally celebrated for his literary achievements, where proto-ecological elements have also been discovered. Goethe's influence on the history of ecological thought is manifest: Darwin, without whose work there could be no science of ecology, cites him in the Origin of Species. Ernst Haeckel's late-nineteenth-century fusion of science and mysticism in the form of monism, which invested a holistic nature with spiritual qualities, is explicitly derived from Goethe.
