Goethe

Transformation
In contrast to substitution, transformation names the evolution--in the old sense of the word's meaning (see evolution)--of one thing into another in time (as in Goethe's theory of the "metamorphosis of plants") rather than one thing simply being replaced by another over time (as in Darwin's conception of natural selection).

In Unancestral Voice Barfield cautions us to keep in mind that "Evolution is a process of transformation: and you can never understand transformation in terms of duality--in terms of the state of affairs before the state of affairs after the transformation--the first causing the second. You can only understand it in terms of an immaterial transforming agent, which is there both before and after the change" (UV 78-79).

"Where there is a total transformation of the material form," he goes on to say, "the something that persists must itself be immaterial" (UV 96).
 

See in particular Unancestral Voice, passim, What Coleridge Thought, passim. See in particular Unancestral Voice, passim, What Coleridge Thought, passim.