Alexander von Humboldt between Enlightenment and Romanticism

Author(s): Michael Dettelbach

Source: Northeastern Naturalist , 2001, Vol. 8, Special Issue 1: Alexander von Humboldt's
Natural History Legacy and Its Relevance for Today (2001), pp. 9-20
Published by: Eagle Hill Institute

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4130723

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Proceedings: Alexancler von Humboldt's Natutral History Legacy and Its Relevance for Toda)

2001 Northeasternl Naturi-alist Special Issue 1:9-20

ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT BETWEEN

ENLIGHTENMENT AND ROMANTICISM

MICHAEL DETTELBACH

ABSTRACT - Since the late 19th century, the image of Alexander von Humboldt has
been fractured into that of the patient and assiduous fact-gatherer, devoted to measure-
ment and quantification, and that of the sensitive soul, awake to the unity and beauty of
the landscape. Concern with emotional and aesthetic responses to the natural world
was, however, central to Humboldt's precise and quantitative approach to natural
history. The unity of his project may be better understood by exploring his youthful
immersion in Enlightenment debates over the nature of the human mind and the
possibility of rational knowledge of nature - debates which took on a special urgency
during the epoch of the French Revolution. Specifically, the reforms of natural history
which Humboldt proposed in the 1790s and practiced during his expedition to the
Americas (1799-1804) drew on the concepts and techniques of "analysis" developed
by the French Encyclopedists and refracted through German politics and philosophy.
Humboldt's approach to natural history thus exemplifies the essential continuity
between Enlightenment doctrines of sensation and sensibility and Romantic assertions
of the unity of nature and the unique role of the naturalist in revealing that unity.

Like the historiography of natural science itself, historical assess-

ments of Alexander von Humboldt have ever been pulled between the
two poles of empiricism and idealism, Enlightenment and Romanticism.
The authors who contributed to the "wissenschaftliche Biographie" of
1872 operated with a conception of scientific knowledge as the product
of careful experiment and observation, guided by a creative theoretical
genius, a sense for the unity of Nature.' To these early biographers,
Humboldt stood as the bastion of Enlightenment empiricism through the
dark years of Hegelian idealism, and they found themselves somewhat
embarrassed when they sought to sum up their hero's
"wissenschaftliche Leistung" in their final volume. The Leipzig as-
tronomer Karl Bruhns, for example, could not describe Humboldt as a
creative, theoretical scientist: "Humboldt's ganze Richtung," Bruhns
wrote, "ging weniger auf das Schaffen in den exakten Wissenschaften,
als auf das Sammeln" (iii: 3). Bruhns and his collaborators repeatedly
praised Humboldt's "Gewissenhaftigkeit und FleiB" (iii: 50) in observ-

1 Karl Bruhns, ed., Alexanider ivon HuMboldt. Eiize wissenischaftliche Biogr-aphie, 3 vols.
(Leipzig, 1872). For- a more complex initerpretation of Humboldt's relationship with the
Hegelian school, see my introduction to Humboldt's Cosmnos (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1997), Vol. 2, pp. xiv, xlii n. 20.

Boston University, Boston , MA 01063. mdettelb@bu.edu.

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 10 Northeastern Natur-alist Special Issue 1

ing and measuring nature, but this only empha

meteorologist Alfred Dove summed up: "Die eig
die unser wissenschaftliches Erkennen Humboldt direct verdankt [...]
lassen sich ohne Muihe zdhlen und messen." In der Geistesgeschichte,
fahrt Dove fort, muB man eine "active-schopferisch" und eine "passive-
empfangliche" Genialitat unterscheiden, wie Spinoza zwischen natura
naturans und natura naturata unterschieden hat. Humboldt war von der
passiven Genialitat gepragt, die "in aufnehmender Seele das geistige
Licht ihrer Gegenwart sammelt, und so der Zukunft wenigstens ein
Abbild [kein Vorbild, meinte Dove] darbietet, aus dem sie betrachtend
Genuss und Lehre zugleich gewinnen mag" (ii: 481-482). In short, by
casting Humboldt as the bastion of empiricism against the excesses of
Romantic idealism, they were forced to demote him to the role of
patron, organizer, supporter, popularizer, contributor to the scientific
work of others, but ultimately not a scientist himself!
Similarly, there was little unity to the collection of observational and
descriptive concerns that in Anglo-American historiography goes under
the name of "Humboldtian Science" (coined by Susan Cannon in 1977),
only an encyclopedic dedication to the systematic and precise measure-
ment of as many physical parameters as possible.2 Conversely, in the
post-war period, especially among geographers and historians of geog-
raphy, a newly romanticized Humboldt was discovered, a proto-ecolo-
gist or "human geographer," in both German and in Anglo-American
historiography. Others have felt compelled to attribute to Humboldt
some form of holism, organicism, or even materialist determinism in
order to give ideal unity to what they see as an otherwise hopelessly
scattered empiricism. Several have stressed Humboldt's indebtedness to
the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant. For instance, in a very
widely read though never published doctoral dissertation completed at
Berkeley in 1971, Anne Macpherson argued that the unity and rationale
of Humboldt's physical geography lay in a vitalism underwritten by
Kantian metaphysics. "Humboldt's work for fifty years was informed
by an underlying metaphysical structure that he derived from the critical
writings of Immanuel Kant," wrote Macpherson. "Humboldt's Kantian
philosophy directed his own investigations of nature, and gave form and
unity to his writing."3 More recently and more typically, Malcolm
Nicolson traced the origins of Humboldt's plant geography to the ideal-
ism of the German Romantics and Naturphilosophen. Though rigor-

2 Susan Cannon, Scienice ill Cullture (New York: Dawson and Science History Publications,
1978), chapter 4.
3 Anne Macpherson, "The Human Geography of Alexander von Humboldt," Dissertation, Uni-
versity of California, Berkeley, 1971; Richard Hartshorne, "The Concept of Geography as a
Science of Space, from Kant and HLImboldt to Hettner," Annals of the Association of Anze ican
Geographers. 48 (1958): 97-108, and more generally, "The Nature of Geography," An7nals of
the Ainerican Associationi of Geogr-aphers, 29 (1939), pp. 171-658.

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 2001 M. Dettelbach 11

ously empirical in practice, Nicolson argues, Humboldt's geography

was underwritten by the "Romantic" belief that Nature was an organic
whole, and that "Man's aesthetic sensitivities could ... transcend the
limitations of reason, beyond the surface of phenomena and, sensuously
and intuitively, grasp the underlying unities of Nature."4
So struggles over the nature of Humboldt's scientific work have long
been struggles over the nature of science itself, and especially over the
roles of experience and insight, observation and theory, the Enlightenment
and the Romantic "reaction." However, recent historiographical develop-
ments make it possible to dismantle the polarity between Enlightenment
empiricism and Romantic idealism, and to view Humboldt's commitment
to empiricism as itself the rationale for his encyclopedic project and at the
same time as that which links him with the efforts of the early Romantics.
Historians have long seen a commitment to "empiricism" as a hallmark of
Enlightenment science and philosophy, but only relatively recently have
the sociology and history of the natural sciences problematized the author-
ity of experience itself. Also, interest in the social and intellectual con-
struction of "public opinion" in the Enlightenment has directed historians'
attention to the ways in which a self-identified "enlightened public" used
this "empiricism" to establish its moral and philosophical authority.
Epistemology has returned to the center of historical interpretations of the
Enlightenment, but now as a loose and evolving literature including
psychology, physiology, and anthropology, collected under the general
idea of "sciences of man." In the Enlightenment, "science of man"
described not a particular scientific discipline or even a proto-discipline,
but the general character of science itself.5 Every true science was a
branch of the science of Man, that is, was appropriate to human nature and
measured itself according to human faculties. David Hume, in the preface
to Treatise of Humnan Nature (1739-40), offered probably the most famous
claim that a "science of man" would supply a new foundation to all
sciences. Success in natural and moral philosophy, Hume argued, required
mastering "the capital or center of these sciences ... human nature itself. In
undertaking an explicitly "experimental" inquiry into the powers of the
human mind, Hume promised "a compleat system of the sciences, built on
a foundation almost entirely new, and the only one upon which they can
stand with any security."6 The Encyclopedists founded their true system
of knowledge on Condillac's account of the "generation and filiation of
knowledge" through the analysis of sensations. D'Alembert described the

4 Malcolm NicolsoIn, "Alexanider voIn HLlumboldt, Holmboldtian Scienice, anid the Origins of the
StuLdy of Vegetationi," History of Science, 25 (1987), pp. 1 78-1 80.
5 Sergio Mor-avia, Beobachtel7cle Vernwift. Philosoplhie unii A17tlhropologie i7 rder- Au lkiiduling
(MuLnich, 1973); idemii, "The Enlightenment anid the Scienices of Man," Historv of'Science, 17
(1980): 247-288.
6 David Holme, A Trecatise olf 'Hicin Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Clarenidon, 1978),
xv-xvi.

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 12 Northeastern Naturalist Special Issue 1

great compendium as simply "a systematic presentation of human experi-

ence." Diderot insisted that the necessary, natural principle of order is Man
himself. "Man is the single term from which one must begin, and to which
all must be brought back, if one wishes to please, to interest, to touch [the
reader], even in the most arid considerations, the driest details. Make an
abstraction of my existence and of the happiness of my fellow beings, and
what will the rest of nature matter to me?"7 It is no accident that scholars
generally now agree that we find the origins of the human and social
sciences in the 18th century: these sciences were constituted by the
reflections of Enlightenment philosophers, attempting to give a new
constitution to the republic of letters and to redescribe their authority in
new public situations.8
Enlightenment "empiricism," then, was itself predicated on a set of
empirical sciences of the mind and human nature, and Humboldt can be
viewed as an heir to this Enlightenment project. Humboldt's scientific
and technical work in the 1790s was devoted to elaborating a philo-
sophical stance founded on the Enlightenment sciences of man, an
account of intellectual authority based on the powers of nature itself. We
can consider Humboldt's natural scientific work to be a contribution to
this Enlightenment project because Humboldt develops his scientific
techniques in light of a specific account of human powers.
These Enlightenment critiques of the nature and authority of philo-
sophical knowledge characteristically drew support from contemporary
medicine and psychology. The pursuit of epistemology through experi-
mental physiology was a common feature of Enlightenment philoso-
phy, from the experimenters of the Royal Society and the physician
John Locke through Montesquieu, Maupertuis, Hartley, and Diderot, to
the early Romantics like Thomas Beddoes and Erasmus Darwin.9 The
discovery of novel powers in living matter in the 18th century supplied
both a didactic example of the primacy of experience over theory and
an important doctrine in accounts of the sensory origins of human
reasoning. Albrecht von Haller's discovery of the "irritability"
(Reizbarkeit) of living tissue, Caspar Friedrich Wolff's detection of a

7 Denis Diderot, "Encyclopddie." In: Enicyclopedie, ou Dictionnaire Raisonne' des sciences, des
arts et des inetiers. Nouvelle imlpression en facsinfile , Vol. V (Paris, 1755; Stuttgart: Friedrich
Fromann, 1966), p. 641, col. 3-4.
8 Simon Schaffer, "Self-Evidence," Critical Inquiry, 18 (1992), pp. 327-362; "Genius." In
Andrew Cunningham and Nicholas Jardine, eds. Romanticism and the Sciences. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 82-100; "Natural Philosophy and Public Spectacle in
the 18th Century." History of Science, 21 (1983), pp. 21-43; Andrew Cunningham and Nicho-
las Jardine, "The Age of Reflexion." In Cunningham and Jardine (Eds.), Romanticisnm and the
Sciences. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989. pp. 1-9.
9 Sergio Moravia, "Philosophie et mddecine en France a la fin du XVIIIe siecle," Studies in
Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, 39 (1972): 1089-1151; Roy Porter, "Medical Science and
Human Science in the Enlightenment." In Inventing Human Science. Von Christopher Fox und
Robert Wokler (Eds.), Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995. pp. 53-87.

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 2001 M. Dettelbach 13

"nisus formativus" in the growth of a chicken embryo, and Abraham

Trembley's display of the regenerative powers of the hydra all served
as lessons in experimental philosophy, but also as support for an episte-
mology based on sensation.
It is therefore not surprising to find that Humboldt offered his
strongest and most sustained critique of scientific method in his physi-
ological experiments. Experiments on the sensitivity of plant and ani-
mal tissues to chemical changes preoccupied Humboldt in the 1790s,
before his expedition to the Americas. On one level, Humboldt's physi-
ological work was dedicated to the investigation of the powers of living
matter, and especially the phenomenon of galvanism. But on another
level, Humboldt's physiological experiments were dedicated to devel-
oping a scientific method, a hermeneutics of experiment. Specifically,
Humboldt argued that the phenomena of life (Vitalitat) in general, and
of galvanism in particular, could not be reduced to any single substance
or force. Alessandro Volta argued that galvanism was simply electric-
ity; others claimed to have discovered the true Lebenskraft in oxygen,
hydrogen, Azot, phlogiston, Lichtstoff, or various combinations thereof,
and that life was a process of "phlogistication," "oxydation," or "com-
bustion;" devotees of the extremely fashionable medical theories of the
Scotsman John Brown believed that life was the product of the "excit-
ability" (Erregbarkeit) of living matter. Whether motivated by the
vanity and ambition of the philosopher, the enthusiasm of the humani-
tarian, or the plain greed of the charlatan, all such reductive theories of
life forced the phenomena themselves into human schemes and fit
Nature to human interests.
By contrast, Humboldt adopted a pose of theoretical abstinence.
Instead of using experiments to test hypotheses and subordinating ob-
servation to the development of theory, Humboldt insisted that experi-
ment and observation had their own, internal dynamic. The principal
task of physical science, he claimed, was not to devise theories, but to so
vary a phenomenon in experiment that the conditions of its appearance
gradually emerged from the observations themselves. Repeatedly,
Humboldt described the job of the experimental philosopher as the
analysis or decomposition (Zergliederung) of physical phenomena and
of physical concepts.10 To make such variations and conditions visible,

10 E.g., Alexander von Humboldt, Versuche uiber die gereizte Muskel- und Nervenfaser, nebst
Vermuthungen uiber den chemischen Process des Lebens in den Thier- und Pflanzenwelt, 2
vols. (Berlin and Posen: Rottman, 1797-98), i: 295, 311, 324, 328; ii: 53, 95, 291; Uber die
Zusammensetzung des Luftkreises (Braunschweig: Vieweg, 1799), p. 151. Humboldt's ac-
count of the meaning of experiment is very close to those which J.W. von Goethe and
Friedrich von Hardenberg (Novalis) developed in the 1790s. See Michael Dettelbach, "Ro-
manticism and Administration: Alexander von Humboldt's Global Physics," Ph.D. diss.,
University of Cambridge, 1993, pp. 95-99; Myles Jackson, "A Spectrum of Belief: Goethe's
'Republic' versus Newtonian 'Despotism'," Social Studies of Science, 24 (1994): 673-701.

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14 Northeasterni Natutralist Special Issue 1

to make natural philosophy into a process of analyzing or decomposing

both phenomena and concepts, Humboldt created an abstract universal
script [Pasigraphie] in which chemical-physiological experiments
could be recorded and compared among one another. "Diese Art,
Naturerscheinungen zu behandeln, scheint mir am fruchtbarsten und
gruindlichsten zu seyn. Thatsachen stehen fest, wenn das fluichtig
aufgefuihrte theoretische Lehrgebaude lIngst eingestuirzt ist," he wrote
in explaining his symbolic script in 1795.11 "Wohl dem Experimentator
aber, den abgeanderte Versuche von einer Theorie zur andern hinfiihren,
dessen Vermuthungen nicht fruih eine Gewissheit erlangen, die von der
ferneren Beobachtung zuriickscheut!"'2
In separate physiological papers and ultimately in the synthetic
Versuche uiber die gereizte Muskel- und Nervenfaser (1797-98), he
identified this empiricism with Francis Bacon.'3 Humboldt liberally
quoted aphorisms from the Novum Organum and prefaced the two
volumes of Versuche with an epigraph taken from Bacon's Advance-
ment of the Sciences, the first part of the "Great Instauration," which
advertised against the dangers of theorizing:

All forms of error reduce to the premature and peremptory reduction of

knowledge to arts and methods, from which time the sciences are seldom
improved; for as young men rarely grow in stature after their shape and
limbs are fully formed, so knowledge, whilst it lies in aphorisms and
observations, remains in a growing state; but when fashioned into meth-
ods though it may be further polished, illustrated and fitted for use, it no
longer increases in bulk and substance. 4

But Humboldt's professed "Baconianism" was of a distinctly late-En-

lightenment kind. In both physiology and his philosophy of science,
Humboldt was much closer to his Enlightenment contemporary, the
English physician Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802), than to Francis Bacon
(1561-1626). In Zoonomia (1794), Darwin's own exposition of the laws
of sensitive matter, Darwin demonstrated that theoretical reasoning was
a property of the arrangement of sensitive, living fibers and their natu-
ral, organic "motions" (and for this reason he has often been considered

11 Alexander von Humboldt, "Ueber die gereizte Muskelfaser, aus einem Briefe an Herrn

Hofrath Blumenbach," Neues Jouirincal der Ph 'ysik, 2 (1795): 115-129, p. 127.

12 Ver-suiche iibe ( die ger-eizte Mutskel- uoizd Ner-veozfaser, i: 6. For a more extensive treatment of
Humboldt's physiology and pasigraphy, see Dettelbach, "Romanticism and Administration,"
Chapter 3.
13 Michael Dettelbach, "Baconianism in RevolIltionary Germany: Humboldt's 'Great
Instauration'," in The Skeptical Tr-aditionz Ar-ouniid 1800, ed. Richard Popkin and Johan van
der Zande (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1998), pp. 175-186.
14 Francis Bacon, Advancement of Learniniig (London: Colonial Press, 1900), 21. Quoted in part
in Versuiche, title pages of both volumes, and in full in an article directed against Volta,
"Ueber die gereizte Muskelfaser, aus einem Briefe an Herrn Hofrath Blumenbach," Neues
Jourlnal det PhYsik, 2 (1795): 127.

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 2001 M. Dettelbach 15

a founder of scientific psychology).'5 Similarly, Humboldt insisted that

the experimenter could (and must) observe the faculty of organic matter
to respond variously to varying stimuli and register the subtlest changes
in condition. But this power itself was hidden from experimental deter-
mination. Humboldt clearly admired Darwin's empirical physiology
and his account of experimental knowledge. He cited Zoonomia appre-
ciatively and often in the Versuche uiber die gereizte Muskel- und
Nervenfaser and inserted an excerpt from the "Ode to Erasmus Darwin"
(which prefaced later editions of Zoonomnia) in support of his strictures
on the interpretation of experiment, and in defense against "den
Verdacht, als hielte ich das Leben selbst far einen chemischen
Prozess."'6 On Humboldt's account, as on Darwin's, experiment was
simply a conscious, methodical version of sensation itself, the detection
of subtle changes in condition; nerves and muscles were simply uncon-
scious analyzers. In short, the physiological work which dominated
Humboldt' s experimental efforts in the 1 790s was as much an attempt to
articulate an Enlightenment epistemological stance, as it was a contribu-
tion to physiology. The Versuche uber die gereizte Muskel- und
Nervenfaser is concerned as much with defining the authority of experi-
mental knowledge as it is with the chemistry of living matter.
Humboldt's physiological experiments are only the most explicit and
dramatic example of his attempt to expound a general hermeneutics of
experiment through experiment itself, the powers of the philosopher
through the powers of matter. His account of experiment as the analysis
(Zergliederung) of a complex whole applied as strictly to inanimate as to
animate Nature. Conversely, Nature itself must be treated as a complex
"Zusammenwirken der Krafte," to be analyzed by precise and subtle
variation of conditions (or by the precise measurement of these co-
variations in nature).'7 His symbolic languages or "pasigraphies" were as
applicable to geology as to physiology, and indeed the insistence on
quantitative precision that marks Humboldt's science, from botany to
political economy, derived from an appreciation of number as a symbolic
language ("die letzten hieroglyphischen Zeichen") through which phe-
nomena could be compared and correlated.'8 The central role of

15 Roy Porter, "Erasmus Darwin: Doctor of Evolution?" In History, Humanity anid Evolution.
James R. Moore (Ed.). Cambridge. Cambridge University Press, 1989, pp. 39-69.
16 Versuche fiber die gereizte Mutskel- iiid Nervenftiser, ii: 39-40.
17 Michael Dettelbach, "The Face of Nature: Precise Measurement, Mapping, and Sensibility in
the Work of Alexander von Humboldt," Studies in the History alnd Philosophy of Biology aisd
the Biomedical Scienices, 30 (1999): 473-504.
18 Hanno Beck, "Alexander von Humboldt's 'Essay de Pasigraphie,' Mexico 1803/04",
Forschungeni und Fortschritte, 32 (1958), pp. 33-39; Alexander von Humboldt, Essai
gdogniostique surl- le gisemsent des a oche vs danis les deutx hgimisphlr-es (Paris, 1 823), Appenidix.
Kosnos, i. Humboldt's little-noticed studies of the history of nuimbers treated numerical
languages on the model of philology, as symbolic systems for analyzing experience, subject
to a characteristic grammar. "Uber die bei verschiedeneni Vdlkeirn iiblichen Systeme von
Zahlzeichen und uber den Ursprung des Stellenwerthes in den indischen Zahlen," Jonr-naljfii
die reine unid angewandlte Mathematik, 4 (1829): 205-23 1.

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16 Northelastern Natutralist Special Issue I

Lavoisier's chemistry in almost all this work derived from this essentially
methodological or epistemological commitment to reducing experimental
natural philosophy to analysis. In the Traitee elementaire de chimie (1789),
Lavoisier transformed the work of chemistry into the use of precise
instruments to detect changes in composition, and the use of symbolic
algebraic language to record those changes. While Humboldt was very
excited by the practical implications of Lavoisier's isolation of oxygen
and hydrogen, his demonstration that water and alkali were composites of
invisible gases, and his discovery that combustion and respiration were
both forms of oxidation, and immediately applied these discoveries to
practical reforms, Lavoisier's chemistry was still more important for its
methodological implications. Humboldt was carried away by "den
behutsamen Gang der Raisonnement" of the Traite. It seemed to him that
Lavoisier had not constructed a chemical theory or chemical system but
offered a "bloBe Erzahlung von Thatsachen."'9 In fact, to Humboldt,
Lavoisier's chemistry suggested a complete "transcendentale Kritik der
Naturwissenschaften" that would restrict the work of natural philosophy
to the registration of variations made visible by precise instruments.20
Conversely, Humboldt strove to "transcendentalize" Lavoisier's chemis-
try by emptying it of all theoretical content and interpreting it as a pure
form of empirical thought, allowing Lavoisier's elements and caloric
(Warmestoff) purely nominal existence.2'
A different formulation of "empiricism," which Humboldt used in-
differently in his geological, physical, and physiological studies of the
1790s, derived directly from the Condillacian, encyclopedist lineage
which led to Lavoisier and the Ideologues:

Vouloir 6tablir les th6ories avant d'avoir rassemble les faits, construire
quand on n'a pas meme encore observe, c'est un [sic] erreur qui de tout
tems a arrete la marche de nos connoissance [sic].22

19 Humboldt to D.L.G. Karsten, Freiberg, 26 November 1791, Julgendbriefte Alexalndeir vson

Hunsboldrs, ed. Fritz Lange and Ilse Jahn (Berlini: Akademnie Verlag, 1973), pp. 161-162.
20 Humboldt to Georg Lichtenberg, 21 April 1792, Jutgenidbr-ieftc Alexaniider- ieon Hu,nboldts, ed.
Fritz Lange and Ilse Jahn (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1973), pp. 183-185.
21 E.g., Aphorismnen atis der- cheinischen Physiologie dier Pflanlzen (Leipzig: Voss, 1794), p. 5,
where Humboldt contrasts Lavoisier's "elements" with the ultimate "Urstoffen der
Dinge...von denen uns aber der Geist dieses Jahrzehends und die bescheidnere Art zuL
philosophieren, mehr zu dichten verbietet." Also Versuche jiber die gereizte Mutskel unizd
Nervenifaser, i: pp. 421-423.
22 Jean-Antoine-Nicolas Caritat, Marquis de Condorcet, Esquisse duitiz tableaut histolriquie des
progres de 1 'esprit hunisainz. Otuvr-age posthunse de Condor-cet. 3eme dd. (Paris, Agasse An V
(1797)), p. 61; Neues Journ-czal der PhYsik, 4 (1797): 140. Humboldt used the same quotation
from Condorcet as an epigraph to a paper on the nature of light read before the Berlin
Gesellschaft Naturforschender Freulnide in October, 1796, puLblished in Ilse Jahn, "Alexander
von Humboldt und die Schwierigkeiten eines Paradigmenwechsels," Leopolodina Jahrbuch
1994, row 3, 40 (1995): 431-453. Also cf. Ver-silclhe, ii: 125 ff. on dangers of substantives like
irritability, magnetism, electricity, heat etc. in becom-ing cruLtches of the mind and slowinig
progress of the sciences.

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 2001 M. Dettelbach 17

This statement echoes the Baconian epigraph to the Versuche iiber die
gereizte Muskel- und Nervenfaser: premature theorizing stunts the
growth of knowledge. It comes, however, from the Marquis de
Condorcet's Esquisse d'un tableau historique des progres de l'esprit
humain (1794). Condorcet based his statement of faith in intellectual
and material progress on an associationist epistemology derived from
Condillac and d'Alembert, which placed the ability to make analogies
and comparisons at the center of its account of Reason. Philosophical
and practical improvement went hand in hand. "'Eine falsche, nicht
durch Erfahrung unterstuitzte Theorie schadet im buirgerlichen Leben
mehr, als alle Unwissenheit in wissenschaftlichen Grundsatzen. Die
Theorie muB aus der Praxis entstehen, noch besser ware es, wenn sie in
der Praxis so versteckt bleiben konnte, daB sie immer als System
erschiene. "'23 Although this sounds like yet another version of the
sentiments Humboldt took from Bacon and Condorcet, it is a quotation
from the economist J. G. Busch (1728-1800), director of the Hamburg
Handlungsakademie, which Humboldt attended 1790-91, and it con-
cluded his 1792 attempt to develop a theory of hallurgy, based on
Lavoisier's new chemistry.
In collecting measurements and observations on a stunningly wide
variety of natural and social phenomena, Humboldt was being neither a
naive empiricist, nor a Romantic idealist, but engaging in an Enlighten-
ment redefinition of the authority of the philosopher. He was recon-
structing experimental philosophy as analysis. The duty of the empirical
philosopher was no longer to build theories, but to observe the co-
variation of phenomena through more or less precise instruments and
lanugages. Romantic intellectuals and nature-philosophers were preoc-
cupied with the same project, redefining the philosopher. Humboldt's
Romantic contemporaries admired not just Humboldt's work, but
Humboldt himself, as a model of philosophical sensibility, a moral and
intellectual exemplar. Carl Ritter, professor of geography at the new
Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universitat in Berlin, held Humboldt up as an ex-
ample of appropriate scientific sensibility for his students: Humboldt
recognized that geography was not principally about compiling maps
"mit kritischer FleiB," but about cultivating one's "eigene
Naturanschauung" into the dynamic essence of nature.24 Similarly,
Georges Cuvier, professor of comparative anatomy at the Paris Museum
and Humboldt's collaborator, could not help admiring in Humboldt's
Ansichten der Natur a man who observed Nature always comparatively,
always in relation to other phenomena:

23 Alexander von Huimboldt, "Versuch iiber einige physikalische uind chemische Grundsatze der
Salzwerkskunide," BergIlninnisches Jouizi-ial, 5 (1792), p. 141
24 Carl Ritter, Erdlkuntle (Berinl: Reiiner, 1817), i: 30.

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18 Northeastern Natutralist Special Issue 1

Parcourant tous les climats, affrontant tous les dangers et toutes les
fatigues, il a observe plus de faits qu'aucun voyageur ... [mais] quand il
presente 'a son lecteur les grands tableaux de la nature il semble s'avoir
toujours contemple; quand il rapproche les faits, rappelle et pese les
opinions, il semble n'avoir jamais quitte la bibliotheque; quand il trace
l'esquisse de ses grands resultats: il semble s'etre livre sans cesse a la
meditation.25

Philippe Albert Stapfer, the Helvetic Republic's resident to Paris during

the First Empire, formulated Humboldt's virtues more economically: he
was "Leibniz et Cook dans un seul homme."26 Always travelling, al-
ways observing, but always recollecting the limits of experience and the
demands of reason.
Not least of Humboldt's admirers was F.W.J. Schelling, who at the
moment of Humboldt's return to Europe was concerned with the reform
of higher education, and sought Humboldt's support for a new periodi-
cal devoted to medical reform. Schelling's Naturphilosophie cultivated
that same dynamic sensibility towards experiment. Indeed, Schelling
welcomed Humboldt back to Europe as an Eroberer, whose conquests
were spiritual: Humboldt was the man who would finally restore to the
human spirit its ancient possession [ihres altes Besitztumj, Nature.27
Along with other Naturphilosophen, Schelling regarded Humboldt as an
exemplary Naturforscher, not despite his devotion to precise measure-
ment, but because of it. By travelling with instruments "in constant
activity," Humboldt showed each point on the earth's surface to be the
product of global forces acting locally.
More surprising to those of us used to thinking of Humboldt as the
scourge of Naturphilosophie, Humboldt returned the compliment. In the
preface to the Ideen zu einer Geographie der Pflanzen, nebst einem
Naturgemalde der Tropenldnder (1805), his first widespread appear-
ance before the German public after his return from America, Humboldt
adopted an appreciative and sympathetic position towards Schelling's
1798 Von der Weltseele and Ideen zu einer Philosophie der Natur. He
expressed "happy and heartfelt interest in a system which, undermining
atomism ... promises to illuminate the phenomena of life, heat, magne-
tism, and electricity, inaccessible to science until now." Humboldt
wrote that Schelling's Naturphilosophie was "the bold undertaking of
one of the most profound men of our century" because it demonstrated
"the possibility of reducing all natural phenomena to the incessant

25 Fonds Cuvier MS 3159, Bibliotheque de l'instituts de France. For the circumstances surround-
ing Cuvier's review, see Dettelbach, "Romanticism and Adiministration," pp. 131-133.
26 Letter to PauluLs Usteri, 19 December 1811, quoted in Rodolphe Luginbiihl, Philippe-Albelt
Stapfer (Paris: Librairie Fischbacher, 1888), p. 316.
27 F.W.J. Schelling to Humboldt, Wiirzburg, im Januar, 1805. Br-iefe cleittscher- Romnantike-, ed.
Willi A. Koch (Leipzig: Dietrich Verlagsbuchhanldlung, 1938), pp. 201-202.

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 2001 M. Dettelbach 19

conflict of elemental forces of matter."28 By contrast, French natural

philosophers invested too much significance in their mathematical for-
mulations of experimental results; they interpreted mathematical sym-
bols as actual substances, not as signs of a dynamic interaction, and this
resulted in a mechanical and atomistic interpretation of nature. Accord-
ing to Humboldt, the French were guilty of a faulty aesthetics: "Sie
haben fur keine andre als mechanische und atomistische
Erklarungsarten Sinn, nirgend aber fur eigentliche Kraft und Wirkung"
and lacked "die vollig naturliche Ansicht der Dinge." The French lacked
sense for the dynamic meaning of observation and sensation; they had
no concept of experiment, he writes,"und die Wissenschaften die dies
verlangen, gelingen ihnen nicht."29
And yet Humboldt was no Naturphilosoph. He and Schelling both
recognized that while Schelling was devoted to rational speculation,
Humboldt was devoted to the study of Nature through experiment and
observation. Both Schelling's Ideen, the philosophical deduction of
Nature from elemental forces, and his own Ideen, the encyclopedic
empirical study of nature, were "Naturgemalde," that is, pictures of
Nature appealing to the inner sensibilities of their audiences.
Schelling's was, however, "eine Naturgemalde einer hoherer Art." But
they also agreed (at least in these early years of the century) that

die Naturphilosophie kann den Fortschritten der empirischen

Wissenschaften nie schadlich sein .... Steht dabei eine Menschenklasse
auf, welche es fOir bequemer halt, die Chemie durch die Kraft des Hirnes
zu treiben, als sich die Hande zu benetzen, so ist das weder Ihre Schuld
noch die der Naturphilosophie iiberhaupt.3"

Of course, Humboldt would use exactly these words, thirty years later,
amidst the threat of religious and political reaction, to condemn
Naturphilosophie.3' By the time Humboldt returned to Berlin in 1827 to
preside over the Gesellschaft Deutscher Naturforscher und Arzte and
hold his public lectures at the Singakademie, certainly, his appreciation
for Naturphilosophie had turned to hostility. In the era of reform, how-
ever, Humboldt considered his hermeneutics of experiment and
Schelling' s Naturphilosophie complementary enterprises. Both
Humboldt's project of encyclopedic measurement and observation and

28 Humboldt, "Ideeni zu eizier Geographie der Pflanzen," in Schriiteni zotr Geogr-aphie der
IPflanzeni, ed. Hanno Beck (Darmstadt: Wissenischaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1989), pp. 44-45.
29 Reported by Wilhelmn voni Hulmboldt in Paris, June, 1798, fromn a conversation with
Alexander. Wilhelim7 'on Hunboldts Gesainmelte Schr-ifteoi, vol. 14 (Berlii: B. Behr, 1916),
pp. 505-506.
30 Humboldt ani Schelling, Paris, 1. FebruLar 1805. Briefe, deultscheir Romnantiker, p. 204
3 1 Letter to Variohagen voni Ense, 1835. B)iefr, von Ale-varoder von Humn7boldt all Varnhagen von
Enise, ed. Luddmilla Assinig, 3rd ed. (Leipzig: F.A.Brockhaus, 1860).

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20 Northeastern Naturalist Special Issue 1

Schelling's quintessentially Romantic effort to demonstrate the identity

of Mind and Nature were dedicated to the cultivation of free individuals,
a Reason, free from the prejudices of theory, theology, or self-interest.
Or, as Humboldt promised his audience at the end of Ideen zu einer
Geographie der Pflanzen (1807), a "moralische Freiheit."32

32 Humboldt, Ideen zu einer Geographie, ed. Hanno Beck, p. 63.

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