SOURCE: Gearey, John. “Faust II and the Darwinian Revolution.” In Goethe's Other Faust: The Drama, Part II, pp. 14-30. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992.

In the following essay, Gearey considers the ways in which Goethe's scientific interests and ideas shaped the structure of Faust II.

In a footnote to the Introduction of his Origin of Species, Darwin cites Goethe as among those earlier thinkers whose views in one way or another had anticipated his own. ‘It is rather a singular instance of the manner in which similar views arise at about the same time, that Goethe in Germany, Dr. Darwin [his grandfather] in England, and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire … in France, came to the same conclusion on the origin of species, in the years 1794-95.’ That is precisely my point. Whatever the differences in the concept of evolution that Goethe and Darwin separately espoused, and however significant those differences would...