"On the principle of metamorphosis. For spiritually striving people, uniting to serve mankind beyond the limits of their own work on earth, Rudolf Steiner increasingly will become an example because he took Goethe's artistic creations and scientific achievements as a foundation for his work. These he carried further and, from them, developed many new things for which Goethe had planted the seeds. Among such developments, are the architectural principles of the Goetheanum in Dornach. As its creator, Rudolf Steiner has shown how Goethe carried the spiritual activity by which he worked in art directly into the realm of science, thus discovering the scientific method by which the organic world, in its living mobility, can be grasped by the human spirit.Educated in the methods of modern science, Steiner took the Goethean principle of metamorphosis (for the discovery of which he called Goethe 'The Copernicus and Kepler of organic science') and made it fruitful for the realm of artistic creation.... The sequence of metamorphoses, with which the present study is concerned, belongs to the earliest examples of this new artistic style. The Seven Signs of Planetary Evolution, drawn by Rudolf Steiner, with which we shall occupy ourselves in the following pages, can be regarded as seeds that contain inexhaustible possibilities of enfoldment, if one develops them further in the right manner." (from the foreword)
