The Invention of Nature

by Andrea Wulf

  The situation was similarly reactionary on the continent. After the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the German states had entered a phase of relative peace but of few reforms. Under the leadership of the Austrian Foreign Minister, Prince Klemens von Metternich, the German states had established the Deutscher Bund during the Congress of Vienna – the German Confederation. It was a loose federation of forty states that replaced what had once been the Holy Roman Empire and then under Napoleon the Confederation of the Rhine. Metternich had envisaged this form of federation in order to rebalance the power in Europe and to counter the emergence of one individual powerful state. There was no head of state and the Federal Assembly in Frankfurt was less a governing parliament than a congress of ambassadors who all continued to represent their own states’ interests. With the end of the Napoleonic Wars, Prussia had regained some economic power when its territory expanded again, now comprising Napoleon’s vassal state, the short-lived Kingdom of Westphalia, as well as the Rhineland and parts of Saxony. Prussia now stretched from its border with the Netherlands in the west to Russia in the east.

  In the German states reform was regarded with suspicion and as the first step on the road to revolution. Democracy, Metternich said, was ‘the volcano which must be extinguished’. Humboldt, who had met Metternich several times in Paris and in Vienna, was disappointed by these developments. Though the two men had corresponded about the advancement of the sciences, they knew each other well enough to avoid political discussions. In private the Austrian Chancellor described Humboldt as ‘a head that’s gone politically awry’ while Humboldt called Metternich a ‘mummy’s sarcophagus’ because his policies were so antiquated.

  The country to which Humboldt had returned was decidedly anti-liberal. With few political rights and a general suppression of liberal ideas, Prussia’s middle classes had turned inwards and into the private sphere. Music, literature and art were dominated by expressions of feelings rather than revolutionary sentiment. The spirit of 1789, as Humboldt had called it, had ceased to exist.

  It wasn’t looking better elsewhere. Simón Bolívar had realized that building nations was far more difficult than fighting wars. By the time Humboldt had moved to Berlin, several colonies had succeeded in overthrowing Spanish rule. Republics had been declared in Mexico, the Federal Republic of Central America, Argentina and Chile as well as those under the leadership of Bolívar: Greater Colombia (which included Venezuela, Panama, Ecuador and New Granada), Bolivia and Peru. But Bolívar’s vision of a league of free nations in Latin America was crumbling as old allies turned against him.

  His pan-American congress in the summer of 1826 had only been attended by four of the Latin American republics. Instead of marking the beginning of a Federation of the Andes, stretching from Panama in the north to Bolivia in the south, it had been a complete failure. The former colonies showed no interest in being united. Worse was to come when news reached Bolívar, in spring 1827, that his troops in Peru had rebelled. And instead of supporting El Libertador, his old friend and Vice-President of Colombia Francisco de Paula Santander praised this revolt and demanded Bolívar’s removal from the presidency. As one of Bolívar’s confidants put it, they had entered an ‘era of blunders’. Humboldt also believed that Bolívar had granted himself far too many dictatorial powers. Of course South America owed a great deal to Bolívar but his authoritarian ways were ‘illegal, unconstitutional and somewhat like that of Napoleon’, as Humboldt told a Colombian scientist and diplomat.

  Nor was Humboldt much more optimistic about North America. The last of the old guard of the founding fathers had gone when Thomas Jefferson and John Adams had died, in perfect synchrony, on the same day, the Fourth of July 1826 and the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. Humboldt had always admired Jefferson for the country he had helped to forge but despaired that not enough had been done regarding the abolition of slavery. When the US Congress had passed the Missouri Compromise in 1820, another door had been opened for slave owners. As the republic expanded and new states were founded and admitted, there had been heated discussions about the issue of slavery. Humboldt was disappointed that the Missouri Compromise permitted new states that were south of 36º30’ latitude (roughly the same latitude as the border between Tennessee and Kentucky) to extend slavery into their territories. Until the end of his life, Humboldt would tell North American visitors, correspondents and newspapers how shocked he was that the ‘influence of slavery is increasing’.

  Weary with politics and revolutions, Humboldt now withdrew into the world of science. And when he received a letter from a representative of the Mexican government requesting his assistance in some trade negotiations between Europe and Mexico, his answer was unambiguous. His ‘estrangement from politics’, he wrote, didn’t permit his involvement. From now on, he would focus on nature and science, and on education. He wanted to help people unlock the power of the intellect. ‘With knowledge comes thought,’ he said, and with thought comes ‘power’.

  On 3 November 1827, less than six months after his arrival in Berlin, Humboldt began a series of sixty-one lectures at the university. These proved so popular that he added another sixteen at Berlin’s music hall – the Singakademie – from 6 December. For six months he delivered lectures several days a week. Hundreds of people attended each talk, which Humboldt presented without reading from his notes. It was lively, exhilarating and utterly new. By not charging any entry fee, Humboldt democratized science: his packed audiences ranged from the royal family to coachmen, from students to servants, from scholars to bricklayers – and half of those attending were women.

  Berlin had never seen anything like it, Wilhelm von Humboldt said. As newspapers announced the lectures, people rushed to secure their seats. There were traffic jams on the days of the talks with policemen on horses trying to control the chaos. An hour before Humboldt took the podium, the auditorium was already crowded. The ‘jostle is frightful’, said Fanny Mendelssohn Bartholdy, the sister of the composer Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy. But it was all worth it. Women, who were not permitted to study at universities or even to attend meetings of the scientific societies, were finally allowed to ‘listen to a clever word’. ‘The gentlemen might scoff as much as they like,’ she told a friend, but the experience was marvellous. Others were not so pleased about the new female audiences and sneered at their enthusiasm for the sciences. One woman was apparently so captivated by Humboldt’s remarks on Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, the director of the Singakademie wrote to Goethe, that her new-found adoration of astronomy was immediately introduced into her wardrobe. She asked her tailor to make the sleeves of her dress ‘twice the width of Sirius’.

  With his gentle voice Humboldt took his audience on a journey through the heavens and deep seas, across the earth, up the highest mountains and then back to a tiny fleck of moss on a rock. He talked about poetry and astronomy but also about geology and landscape painting. Meteorology, the history of the earth, volcanoes and the distribution of plants were all part of his lectures. He roamed from fossils to the northern lights, and from magnetism to flora, fauna and the migration of the human race. The lectures were a portrait of a vivid kaleidoscope of correlations that spanned the entire universe. Or, as his sister-in-law Caroline von Humboldt described them, taken together they became Alexander’s ‘entire great Naturgemälde’.

  Humboldt’s preparatory notes reveal how his mind worked, branching out from one idea to the next. He started conventionally enough, with a piece of paper on which he jotted down his thoughts in a fairly linear manner. But as he went on, new ideas came up which he squeezed on to the paper – sideways or into the margins with squiggles and lines separating his different points. The more he mulled over his lecture, the more information he added.

  When the page was full, he filled up countless more small pieces of paper with his tiny handwriting, and then glued them all on to his notes. Humboldt had no qualms about tearing books apart, pul
ling pages from thick volumes which he also stuck on his paper with little red and blue sticky dots – a nineteenth-century version of Blu-tack. As he went along, he placed bits of paper on top of each other, some buried completely under the new layers, while others could be folded out from beneath. Questions to himself crowded the notes, along with little sketches, statistics, references and reminders. By the end the original paper was a many-layered bricolage of thoughts, numbers, quotes and notes with no apparent order to anyone other than Humboldt.

  Humboldt’s lecture notes on plant geography (Illustration Credit 15.2)

  Everybody was enthralled. Newspapers reported how Humboldt’s ‘new method’ of lecturing and thinking surprised the audience with the way that it connected seemingly disparate disciplines and facts. ‘The listener,’ one newspaper wrote, ‘is enchained by an irresistible power.’ This was the culmination of Humboldt’s work of the past three decades. ‘I have never heard anyone in an hour and a half give expression to so many new ideas,’ one scholar wrote to his wife. People remarked on the extraordinary clarity with which Humboldt explained this complex web of nature. Caroline von Humboldt was deeply impressed. Only Alexander, she said, could present such ‘wonderful depth’ with a lightness of touch. The lectures heralded a ‘new epoch’, a newspaper declared. When Humboldt’s German publisher, Johann Georg von Cotta, heard about the success of the first lecture, he immediately suggested paying someone to take notes that then could be published. He offered the grand sum of 5,000 thalers but Humboldt refused. He had other plans and would not be rushed.

  Humboldt was revolutionizing the sciences. In September 1828 he invited hundreds of scientists from across Germany and Europe to attend a conference in Berlin.1 Unlike previous such meetings at which scientists had endlessly presented papers about their own work, Humboldt put together a very different programme. Rather than being talked at, he wanted the scientists to talk with each other. There were convivial meals and social outings such as concerts and excursions to the royal menagerie on the Pfaueninsel in Potsdam. Meetings were held among botanical, zoological and fossil collections as well as at the university and the botanical garden. Humboldt encouraged scientists to gather in small groups and across disciplines. He connected the visiting scientists on a more personal level, ensuring that they forged friendships that would foster close networks. He envisaged an interdisciplinary brotherhood of scientists who would exchange and share knowledge. ‘Without a diversity of opinion, the discovery of truth is impossible,’ he reminded them in his opening speech.

  Around 500 scientists attended the conference. It was an ‘eruption of nomadic naturalists’, Humboldt wrote to his friend Arago in Paris. Visitors arrived from Cambridge, Zurich, Florence and as far away as Russia. From Sweden, for instance, came Jöns Jacob Berzelius, one of the founders of modern chemistry, and from England several scientists including Humboldt’s old acquaintance Charles Babbage. The brilliant mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauß, who came from Göttingen and stayed for three weeks in Humboldt’s apartment, thought the congress was like pure ‘oxygen’.

  Despite the frantic pace of his life, Humboldt made time to renew his friendship with Goethe. Almost eighty years old and 200 miles away in Weimar, Goethe was too frail to come to Berlin, but Humboldt visited him. Goethe was envious of his friends in Berlin who had the pleasure of seeing Humboldt regularly. The ageing poet had long followed Humboldt’s every move, often pestering mutual friends for information. In his mind, Goethe said, he had ‘always accompanied’ his old friend, and meeting Humboldt was one of the ‘brightest points’ in his life. Over the previous two decades they had corresponded regularly and Goethe thought that every letter from Humboldt was invigorating. Whenever Humboldt sent his latest publications, Goethe read them immediately, but he missed their lively discussions.

  Goethe felt increasingly removed from scientific advances. Unlike Paris, he complained, where French thinkers were united in one great city, the problem in Germany was that everybody lived too far apart. With one scientist in Berlin, the next in Königsberg and yet another in Bonn, the exchange of ideas was stifled by distance. How different life would be, Goethe thought after seeing Humboldt, if they lived close together. A single day with Humboldt brought him further than years ‘on my isolated path’, Goethe said.

  For all the joy of having his scientific sparring partner back, there was one subject – albeit a huge one – on which they disagreed: the creation of the earth. When Humboldt had studied at the mining academy in Freiberg, he had followed the ideas of his teacher Abraham Gottlieb Werner, who had been the main proponent of the Neptunist theory – believing that mountains and the earth’s crust had been shaped by the sedimentation deposited by a primordial ocean. But following his own observations in Latin America Humboldt had become a ‘Vulcanist’. He now believed that the earth had been formed through catastrophic events such as volcano eruptions and earthquakes.

  Everything, Humboldt said, was connected below the surface. The volcanoes he had climbed in the Andes were all linked subterraneously – it was like ‘a single volcanic furnace’. Clusters and chains of volcanoes across great distances, he said, bore testimony to the fact that they were not individual local occurrences but part of a global force. His examples were as graphic as they were terrifying: in one sweeping move he connected the sudden appearance of a new island in the Azores on 30 January 1811 to a wave of earthquakes that shook the planet for a period of more than a year afterwards, from the West Indies, the plains of Ohio and Mississippi and then to the devastating earthquake that had destroyed Caracas in March 1812. This was followed by a volcanic eruption on the island of Saint Vincent in the West Indies on 30 April 1812 – the same day when the people who lived at the Rio Apure (from where Humboldt had launched his Orinoco expedition) claimed to have heard a loud rumble deep below their feet. All these events had been part of one huge chain reaction, Humboldt said.

  And though theories of shifting tectonic plates would only be confirmed in the mid-twentieth century, Humboldt had already discussed in 1807 in the Essay on the Geography of Plants that the continents of Africa and South America had once been connected. Later he wrote that the reason for this continental shift was ‘a subterranean force’. Goethe as a firm Neptunist was appalled. Everybody was listening to these mad theories, he complained, much like ‘savages to the sermons of missionaries’. It was ‘absurd’ to believe, he said, that the Himalaya and the Andes – huge mountain ranges that stood ‘rigid and proud’ – could ever have been suddenly lifted out of the belly of the earth. He would need to rewire his entire ‘cerebral system’, Goethe joked, if he were ever to agree with Humboldt on this subject. But despite these scientific disagreements, Goethe and Humboldt remained good friends. Maybe he was just getting old, Goethe wrote to Wilhelm von Humboldt, because ‘I appear to myself more and more historical’.

  Humboldt enjoyed seeing Goethe again, but he was even happier to spend time with Wilhelm. The two brothers had had their differences in the past, but Wilhelm was his only family. ‘I know where my happiness lies,’ Alexander wrote, ‘it is close to you!’ Wilhelm had retired from public service and had moved with his family to Tegel, just outside Berlin. For the first time since their youth, the brothers lived close and saw each other regularly. It was in Berlin and Tegel that they were finally able to ‘work together scientifically’.

  Wilhelm’s passion was the study of languages. As a boy he had lost himself in Greek and Roman mythology. Throughout his career, Wilhelm had used every diplomatic posting to learn more languages, and Alexander had also supplied him with notes on indigenous Latin American vocabulary – including copies of Inca and pre-Inca manuscripts. Just after Alexander’s return from his expedition, Wilhelm had spoken of the ‘mysterious and wonderful inner connection of all languages’. For decades Wilhelm had keenly felt his lack of time to investigate the subject, but now he had the leisure to do so. Within six months of his retirement, he had given a lecture at the Academy of Sciences in
Berlin about comparative language studies.

  Much as Alexander looked at nature as an interconnected whole, so Wilhelm too was examining language as a living organism. Language, like nature, Wilhelm believed, had to be placed in the wider context of landscape, culture and people. Where Alexander searched for plant groups across continents, Wilhelm investigated language groups and common roots across nations. Not only was he learning Sanskrit, but he also studied Chinese and Japanese as well as Polynesian and Malayan languages. For Wilhelm this was the raw data he needed for his theories, just like Alexander’s botanical specimens and meteorological measurements.

  Though the brothers worked in different disciplines, their premises and approaches were similar. Often, they even used the same terminology. Where Alexander had searched for the formative drive in nature, Wilhelm now wrote that ‘language was the formative organ of thoughts’. Just as nature was so much more than the accumulation of plants, rocks and animals, so language was more than just words, grammar and sounds. According to Wilhelm’s radical new theory, different languages reflected different views of the world. Language was not just a tool to express thoughts but it shaped thoughts – through its grammar, vocabulary, tenses and so on. It was not a mechanical construct of individual elements but an organism, a web that wove together action, thought and speaking. Wilhelm wanted to bring everything together, he said, into an ‘image of an organic whole’, just like Alexander’s Naturgemälde. Both brothers were working on a global level.