Agnes Arber's Goethe

The following essay details how Agnes Arber interpreted and evaluated J. W. Goethe's scientific writings and, more particularly, the ways in which she made use of them in her own plant morphology. I argue that Goethe's morphology functioned for Arber primarily as a tool to interrogate, critique and position herself in relation to contemporaneous German "idealistic morphologies", particularly Wilhelm Troll's. With reference to Arber's unpublished notebooks and correspondence as well as to her published works, I sketch a narrative of Arber's receptions of Goethe, Troll and their interrelation, before considering, in three sections in turn, the alternatives to idealistic morphology that structure her 1950 monograph, The Natural Philosophy of Plant Form: (1) her partial-shoot theory; (2) her refashioning of the historiography of botany; (3) her expanded notion of form into which she integrates concepts of function, cause and analysis. I conclude with some reflections on the connections Arber draws between idealistic morphology, Goethe-interpretation and the figure of the One, which functions in her work as both temptation and object of suspicion.