duly pondering over it, evolved out of his inmost consciousness the discovery that the Mothers are the “creating and sustaining principle, from which everything proceeds that has life and form on the surface of the Earth.” Köstlin denies that they are creative, but says they are the sustaining and conservative principle, adding: “They are Goddesses, who preside over the eternal metamorphoses of things, of all that already exists.” Düntzer calls the Mothers the “primitive forms (or ideas) of things,”—Urdilder der Dinge. But, according to Rosenkranz, they are “the Platonic Ideas,” while Hartung, agreeing with Duntzer that they are “the primitive forms of things,” adds that “they dwell in the desert of speculative thought.” Weisse states that they are “the formless realm of the inner world of spirit—the invisible depth of the mind, struggling to bring forth its own conceptions.” From this view it is but a step to the matrices of Paracelsus, which, in fact, we find partly accepted by Deycks, who sees in the Mothers, as in the matrices, “the elemental or original material of all forms.” Riemer’s view is substantially the same,—“they are the elements from which spring all that is corporeal as well as all that is intellectual.”
The theories which most of the above critics spin from these interpretations are too finely and consistently metaphysical to have been intended by a poet like Goethe, whose nature recoiled from metaphysical systems. Nevertheless, they are all guesses in the same direction, and perhaps if we do not attach too literal a significance to Goethe’s mysterious Deep, wherein is no Space, Place, or Time, and are content to stop short of the very “utterly deepest bottom ” of conjecture, we may get a little nearer to his actual conception. It is not easy to conceive how Formlessness can be represented by Form, though we may very well accept it as a vast, mysterious background ; and this is all, I feel sure, that Goethe intended.
Schnetger has picked up the most satisfactory clew, Kreyssig has followed it, and Goethe himself has given us
an unconscious hint of its correctness. The commentary of
W
