. . . let me remind you of a famous passage in which Samuel Taylor Coleridge defined organic form. In a lecture on Shakespeare, given in 1818, he made a distinction between what he called mechanic form and organic form. "Form is mechanic," he said "when on any given material we impress a predetermined form, not necessarily arising out of the properties of the material." Organic form, on the other hand, is innate; shaping itself fron within, as it develops, so that "the fullness of its development is one and the same with the perfection of its outward form."
