Siehe er geht vor mir uber / ehe ich's gewahr werde, / und verwandelt sich / ehe ich's merke (Goethe 12: 7). 1 Goethe chose these words from the Book of Job—from a section in which Job confronts the indescribability of the God of the Old Testament—as the epigraph of his 1817 collection of scientific and morphological studies. As an epigraph, the sentence simply posits a masculine something or someone that poses a challenge to the human perceptual ap- paratus—an indeterminate phenomenon that, just as it makes itself present, generates an awareness of a perceptual and temporal blind spot. The words frame the central problem, and perhaps the structural condition, of the study of morphology: how can one capture a phenomenon—or rather, the origin of phenomenality as such, the Urphanomen—when that which one seeks con- tinually eludes one's grasp? Morphology, as the study of the way in which phenomena change over time, is a science of becoming rather than being. At the core of the morpho- logical enterprise, ontology—if one may even speak of ontology in this con- text—is situated in a gap held open between the perceptual apparatus and the becoming of phenomena, a gap that frustrates the attempts of the subject qua subject to observe phenomena in their temporal totality. Such a gap has little to do with the Kantian split between subjects and things in themselves, but rather, is rooted in the difference between the temporality of human percep- tion and the temporality of phenomena. 2 Whereas morphology unfolds over an expanse of time, human perception—as concentrated in the presence of sensory intuition, or Anschauung—is necessarily temporally focalized. Even if human perception, as manifest in a particular individual, has its own history and its own future possibilities, and is therefore just as morphologically and temporally differentiated as the phenomenon it observes, the temporality of the observing subject and that of the phenomenon never coincide. The central question of morphology then seems to be: how can one observe metamor-