The shift from seeing art and science as competing activities to seeing them as complementary involves a shift in our mode of perception. Instead of "seeing difference," we can learn to "see relatedness." This change in perceptual framework involves a shift from seeing disconnected parts to seeing the parts intrinsically related to the whole. The German poet and scientist Goethe exemplified this shift in his work. Goethe saw the parts in the context of the whole that they both create, and from which they take their meaning. This relationship between the part and the whole is found in the relationship between individual plants (parts) and the biotic context in which they grow (whole). The plants assume growth forms that reflect the biotic context, which they create. Agnes Arber also studied the relationship between the part and whole in the development of her Partial-Shoot Theory of the leaf. This theory has recently found support through the genetic analysis of leaf mutants of pea. In Psychology, the ability to "see relatedness" is know as "holistic" or "configural" processing, in contrast to "analytic" processing. Faces are processed holistically, while many other objects such as houses are processed analytically. In contrast to analytic processing, the bases of holistic processing are non-verbalizable and non-analyzable. In systematics, holistic processing can be used to classify data (cotyledon shapes, for instance) in the definition of characters and character states. Preliminary results suggest that this method gives better inter-investigator agreement in character states than does analytic processing. The union of artistic and scientific modes of seeing allows us to put Albert Einstein's dictum into practice: “The significant problems we have cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them.”

Key words: Agnes Arber, art, character state, character, Goethe, holistic processing, part and whole