HUMBOLDT.
THE world has just lost one of the most indefatigable and gigan- tic workers that it has ever produced. It is not easy to parallel the immense extent of the field which Humboldt has traversed, but how difficult would the parallel become if we attempted to equal the minuteness and precision with which he worked the de- tails of that field ! In one sense he may be said, as all truly great men do, to belong to the time which he initiated rather than to that which produced him. He at least anticipated if he did not incite the most characteristic influence of the present day. All such artificial classifications of epochs, however, are fallacious. Any intellectual superiority which the present day can boast has not been self-produced, but was prepared for it ; for we may re- member that all the qualities that we have we owe to our fathers. Nor does it lie within human knowledge to assign specific causes for general results. Suffice it that Alexander von Humboldt " went ahead" in the eighteenth century, much in the spirit of scientific investigation, with a view to intellectual and moral as well as practical results, which has come into fashion and favour in the middle of the nineteenth century. Gifted with an intense love and power of observation, early trained to an employment, in the Government mines of Prussia, which combined some scientific knowledge with no small opportunity and direct practical results, his natural capacities were drawn forth and taught their applica- tion. He had means and opportunity ; he made himself ac- painted with three quarters of the globe, both generally and
in detail. His inborn faculty of combining microscopic exactness with broad generalization, was thus educated through a long lifetime, and it naturally led him to his great endeavour--a coordination of the sciences, so as to lay before the human race, "for its information and guidance," the exact as well as general knowledge of this Kosmos in which we live, and to which the humblest of human beings belongs. His labour to a certain extent anticipated, we cannot say exclusively called forth, the tendency of the whole age, with its large appli- cation of practical science, its more generous interpretation of material philosophy, and its correction of many old prejudices.
But it would be a great mistake to suppose that the influence of Humboldt was circumscribed precisely by the amount of in- struction conveyed in his great work, or even in the monographs that preceded it. Scarcely one writer, if any one, has so well il- lustrated the progress that a single mind may make in resolving the many sciences into one science ; in bringing back that imper- fect and complicated thing called human knowledge to a more simple sense of the creation in which we live. Humboldt's success has unquestionably strengthened and confirmed similar tendencies already existing in other writers of a congenial class. We have before had attempts at forming a comprehensive encyclopedia; and great rhilosopers like Bacon have contemplated that encyclo- pedia with a desire to grasp its instruction as a unity ; but Hum- boldt unquestionably made the greatest way in reuniting the spe- cific sciences, not simply to the general mass of recorded know- ledge, but to the intelligence and habitual thought of daily life. This was his great work.
We see it objected that he did not cultivate the more purely intellectual studies of his brother William, and we are told that " a smile went round the circles both of philosophy and politics, when Alexander, in laying out the scheme of his Kosmos, pro- posed to omit the whole subject of mental philosophy." There is some truth, but not the whole truth in this limitation of Hum- boldt's functions.
It is a still greater mistake to talk of the " Resmos " as a fail- ure, though the writer of the powerful essay to which we refer, in the Daily News of Monday last, is perhaps right in questioning " whether practically speaking, it is not impossible for the same mind to effect what Humboldt did and what he failed to do.
Whenever (if ever) we have a Kosmos,' it will be given us by a
man who can immediately and thoroughly adopt the results of other men's labours as material for his peculiar faculty of ascer- taining relations between vastnesaes and aggregates which are to him manageable single portions of the great whole." It is hazard- ous to predict what we may or may not have ; but one of the most obvious facts on the face of contemporary literature is, that books are written now in a Kosmical spirit ; each sci- ence not only having a more distinct consciousness of the aids which it derives from others, but repaying the service by con- ducting its own exposition in such a manner as to serve others. As the astronomer can make but little way without the geologist, the mathematician, the photologist, the mechanic —as the geo- logist depends upon the astronomer, the botanist,
zoologist, chemist, mechanist,—as the agriculturist begins to acknowledge his debts to these, "with a lively sense of future
favours "—as in short, each journeyman knows that he is but an apprentice under the great corporation of federated sciences, so it is probable that we shall ultimately owe the work contemplated by Humboldt to no single man, but to a better disciplined body
of scientific philosophers. Meanwhile, even the oyalopaidists, like Dionysius Lardner—removed at the same time with Humboldt—
caught a larger purpose for their work, and did it all the better; and other writers, who have dealt more with individual sciences, have interpreted their functions in such a spirit that their mo- nographs form chapters in the still great unwritten book of Kos- mos ; as the Herschel of our day has enlarged his glorious inheri- tance in the stars.
Humboldt is accused of being a courtier. While his elder brother William, studied language, philosophy, and political principles, with an independence that caused his exclusion from Court, Alexander, it is said, so trimmed his philosophy as to win promotion, and was enabled constantly to display more stars on his coat and more honours on his head. If we admitted this, surely it is no small thing for the world that the philosophy of Humboldt has become to a certain extent identified with the very highest class on the continent,—with the Court society of " Ger- many" ; a species of philosophic bienseance which is the thing" from Berlin to South Kensington. But there are higher considerations, The peculiarities of mind which made Humboldt a courtier have not been without very sensible and, we believe, incalculably useful effects upon science, intellectual progress, and even morals. In the actual semi- barbarous state of the world, it is not to be denied that Hum- boldt's acceptance in the class of society contemplated by the Almanac de Gotha has materially assisted in 'iving currency to his ideas ; but that is the smallest effect of his position. It is absurd to treat Humboldt as a timeserver ; he is altogether a man so singular that he belongs to a class of exceptionals. He stood alone, not only in combining the faculties of detail and generali- zation, or the offices of philosopher and chamberlain, but in some other ihings. He not only died unmarried, but he is amongst the very small list of those eminent men who are supposed never to have formed, in any shape or kind, what is called an attach- ment"; as William Pitt is only suspected of such a thing ; and it is a curious coincidence that Newton belonged to the same ahem Total devotion to the work in hand appears to have sainnated Humboldt, whether in the writing of Court notes or in-the pur- suit of court etiquette, in writing notes of Tartarean steppes and South American rivers, or pursuing the etiquette of the Kosmos. But combined with these gigantic powers of observation, of classified description, and large lucid deduction, was a striking modesty which made him limit the statement of the conclusion to the warrant which he conceived himself to have worked out.
Hence, probably, that omission of one philosophy which caused " a smile in the circles." Hence, no doubt, one large negafive characteristic of his volumes, which facilitated their circulation and adoption by vast numbers where more positive deductions would have prevented. But the positive portion of his writing has only had the more extensive, complete, and reproductive acceptance ; while this great example of intellectual abnegation has had its influence in checking intolerant dogmatism on all sides, including the dogmatism of the sceptic as well as of the orthodox —an ex- ample all the more powerful for not standing alone. This result has already had the most marked and healthy effect in relieving scientific inquiry and discussion of the most formidable obstruc- tion which had hitherto burdened their progress.
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