ABSTRACT
Thus ends the paragraph that begins w i t h Freud's bir th , i n a short autobiography he wrote i n 1925.1 Much earlier, i n The Interpretation of Dreams (1900), Freud had referred to "the incomparably beautiful essay by Goethe, for i t was the recitation of this essay in a popular lecture that pushed me into the study of natural science when I was irresolute as I faced graduation." 2
Recently scholarship has come to the conclusion that the essay was not really by Goethe but by Georg Christoph Tobler. 3 But when Goethe himself was shown this essay in his old age and asked whether he had wri t ten it , he said that he d id not remember for sure but that he
could have wri t ten i t (his exact words w i l l be considered i n Section 11); and so i t was included i n his collected works. One of Goethe's biographers says that the young Goethe expressed his v iew of nature "poetically i n verse and prose, as w e l l as i n conversation. A young Swiss visitor to Weimar, Tobler, noted down a fragment of such a conversation-/On nature' . . . . " 4 I n Freud's t ime "Nature" was quite generally credited to Goethe, and it is noteworthy that he himself felt that he was fol lowing Goethe's direction when he choose his profession. Not only that, but he wanted his readers to know this. Goethe had been a scientist as w e l l as a poet, he had made a biological discovery (the intermaxillary bone), and he had wri t ten about the metamorphosis of plants. Beyond that he had championed a distinctive, non-Newtonian conception of science.5
