" In some ways this was Goethe’s greatest achievement: the search for the serial relationships in nature, emphasizing border experiences, the junctures where “the real joints of nature” are located, is most likely to reveal the process of change, development, organizing principles. This is also why it needed individuals who were both poet and scientist, who could combine “imagination, observation and thought in the act of language. "

― Peter Watson , The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century