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From the concept of the ur-plant Goethe soon learned to develop another concept which was to express the spiritual principle working in a particular plant species, just as the ur-plant was the spiritual principle covering the plant kingdom as a whole. He called it the type.
Just as in the single plant organism the different parts are a graduated revelation of the ur-plant, so are the single kinds and species within the total plant world. Barely hinting at itself in the lowest vegetable species, it comes in the next higher stages into ever clearer view, finally streaming forth in full glory in the magnificence of the manifold blossoming plants.
From this point of view, tropical vegetation is 'abnormal' in the same sense as was the proliferated rose which confirmed for Goethe's physical perception that inner law of plant-growth which had already become clear to his mind. The ur-plant will be the strangest creature in the world, for which nature herself should envy me.
'Primeval plant', for instance, used by some translators of Goethe, raises the misunderstanding to which Goethe's concept has anyhow been subject from the side of scientific botany that by his ur-plant he had in mind some primitive, prehistoric plant, the hypothetical ancestor in the Darwinian sense of the present-day plant kingdom.
Not only do all the different leaf forms arise, through endless changing, out of each other, but the leaf, in accordance with the same principle, also changes itself into all the other organs which the plant produces in the course of its growth. It is by precisely the same principle that the ur-plant reveals itself in the plant kingdom as a whole.
Quite absorbed in his description of plant metamorphosis, Goethe went in with Schiller and climbed the stairs to the latter's study. Once there, he seized pen and paper from Schiller's writing desk, and to bring his conception of the ur-plant vividly before his companion's eyes he made 'a symbolic plant appear with many a characteristic stroke of the pen'.
In the manifold types which are thus seen active in the plant world we meet offsprings, as it were, of the mother, the 'ur-plant', which in them assumes differentiated modes of action.
To become more familiar with the conception of the ur-plant, let us bring the life-cycle of the plant before our inner eye once again.
Just as Goethe saw in the ur-plant the Idea common to all plant-forms or, in the various plant-organs, the metamorphosis of one and the same ur-organ, so was Mayer convinced of the existence of an ur-force which expressed itself in varying guises in the separate energy-forms of nature.
Seen with Goethe's eyes, the plant kingdom as a whole appears to be a single mighty plant. All these levels have come successively into existence, as geological research has shown; the ur-plant achieved these various tree-formations successively, thus giving up again its state of expansion each time after having reached it at a particular level.
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