In sections 76 and 77 of the Critique of the Power of Judgment Kant articulates the problematic concept of an intuitive understanding, through which we, finite beings, represent to ourselves the supersensible origin or ground of our world. These sections were of fundamental importance to the development of German Idealism and its attempt to think through the idea of absolute knowledge. In the present paper, I will be concerned with another inheritance of the notion of an intuitive understanding in Goethe’s Scientific practice. After articulating briefly and in general terms Kant’s conception of such an infinite intellect, I attempt to show at some length how Goethe reinterprets these characteristic so as to make them the basis of his own method of the investigation of living nature. I conclude my talk with a brief discussion of some of the more issues raised by this transposition, as they appear in Goethe’s ‘Theory of Colors’.