Goethe's scientific investigations into optics, animal and plant morphology, geology, and meteorology shared what he called exact sensorial imagination. A careful observer, Goethe represented nature faithfully, acknowledging that act of seeing is an act of cognizing, and that theorize every time we look carefully at the Making explicit the mental processes by which objects of sight become objects of thought, Goethe turned the non-sensory element of seeing into an instrument of delicate (1) Goethe's understanding of himself as both poet and scientist depended on his conviction that his two vocations sprang from the same impulse and were at heart analogous. By restoring the qualitative to scientific investigation, he could do both science and art while maintaining his goal of a unified human knowledge. He promoted the collaborative enterprise of adding to knowledge about the physical world without rudely insisting on one mode of explanation (GS 312). Goethe's interest both mineral and organic natural phenomena was essentially developmental--seeing the principles at work a phenomenon's coming into being. Like his own autobiography, which he labored over looking for similarly formative principles, Goethe's scientific monographs demonstrate a poet's close attention to the figurative dimension of representing phenomena language. In them, he articulates the Romantic desire to merge self and object not as an ideal, but as a state attainable through practical exercises phenomenological observation. According to Goethe, whether a plant, a cloud formation or a landscape, recreating a phenomenon consciousness and language begins to render its organizing principles visible. In making accessible properties that belong to the phenomenon, the method could contribute to legitimate knowledge of the natural world. (2) Goethe's exact sensorial imagination, like Wordsworth's, occupies a middle ground between idealism and empiricism. For example, Wordsworth's Waterfowl, the perceiving subject is the vehicle through which bird flight becomes intelligible as an expression of principles at work the landscape itself rather than as an event occurring within that landscape. Wordsworth and Goethe stand at the beginning of the phenomenological tradition; equally, their ideas come out of a shared historical context. The question Goethe said he asked himself in observing nature on a scale large or small ... Who speaks here, the object or you? (GS 308) has continued relevance. Wordsworth excerpted Waterfowl from Home at for inclusion the fourth edition of Guide to the Lakes (1823). By itself, Waterfowl is much like Dorothy's Grasmere journal from the same period--an informal sketch of a flock of birds on a winter afternoon. Wordsworth's way of seeing Waterfowl is characteristic of his poetry, except when he is concerned with oracular (The Prelude XII (1805) 250). As he wrote to Francis Wrangham. I have great things meditation, but as yet have only been doing ones (qtd. Darlington, ed. 14) In such little ones, as the un-ambitious Waterfowl Wordsworth offers an experience that dissolves rigid distinctions between object and context and makes what Goethe called the Ur-phenomenon apparent. Waterfowl illustrates aspects of Goethe's method. Goethe's anti-reductive approach requires a training of consciousness, refining a practice of staying close to the phenomenon, and rendering it intelligible rather than explaining it functional terms. He said that each phenomenon nature, rightly observed, wakens us a new organ of inner understanding (GS 39). According to Goethe, one-sided attention to causal explanations prevents an observer from seeing a phenomenon its own terms. In studying an animal, for example. Goethe recommended that the scientist begin with the totality of the organism rather than with functional explanations of its parts: We will not claim that a bull has been given horns so that he can butt; instead we will try to discover how he might have developed horns he uses for butting (GS 56). …