The Invention of Nature

In the late eighteenth century, some scientists began to question this mechanical model of nature, noting its failure to explain the existence of living matter. And by the time Humboldt began to experiment with ‘animal electricity’, more and more scientists believed that matter was not lifeless but that there had to be a force that triggered this activity. All over Europe scientists began to discard Descartes’s ideas that animals were essentially machines. Physicians in France, as well as the Scottish surgeon John Hunter and in particular Humboldt’s former professor in Göttingen, the scientist Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, all began to formulate new theories of life. When Humboldt was studying in Göttingen, Blumenbach had published a revised edition of his book Über den Bildungstrieb. In it Blumenbach presented a concept that explained that several forces existed within living organisms such as plants and animals. The most important was what he called the Bildungstrieb – the ‘formative drive’ – a force that shaped the formation of bodies. Every living organism, from humans to mould, had this formative drive, Blumenbach wrote, and it was essential for the creation of life.

For Humboldt nothing less was at stake in his experiments than the undoing of what he called the ‘Gordian knot of the processes of life’.

2

Imagination and Nature

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Humboldt

IN 1794 ALEXANDER VON Humboldt briefly interrupted his experiments and his mining inspection tours to visit his brother, Wilhelm, who now lived with his wife Caroline and their two young children in Jena, some 150 miles south-west of Berlin. Jena was a town of only 4,000 people that lay within the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, a small state that was headed by an enlightened ruler, Karl August. It was a centre of learning and literature that within a few years was to become the birthplace of German Idealism and Romanticism. The University of Jena had become one of the largest and most famous in the German-speaking regions, attracting progressive thinkers from across the other more repressive German states because of its liberal attitude. There was no other place, said the resident poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller, where liberty and truth ruled so much.

Fifteen miles from Jena was Weimar, the state’s capital, and the home of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany’s greatest poet. Weimar had fewer than 1,000 houses and was said to be so small that everybody knew everybody. Cattle were driven through the cobbled streets and the post was delivered so irregularly that it was easier for Goethe to send a letter to his friend Schiller, who worked at the university in Jena, with his greengrocer on her delivery rounds rather than wait for the mail coach.

In Jena and Weimar, one visitor said, the brightest minds came together like the sunrays in a magnifying glass. Wilhelm and Caroline had moved to Jena in spring 1794 and were part of the circle of friends around Goethe and Schiller. They lived on the market square opposite Schiller – so close that they could wave out of the window to arrange their daily meetings. When Alexander arrived, Wilhelm dispatched a quick note to Weimar, inviting Goethe to Jena. Goethe was happy to come and stayed, as always, in his guest rooms at the duke’s castle, not far away from the market square, just a couple of blocks north.

During Humboldt’s visit, the men met every day. They made a lively group. There were noisy discussions and roaring laughter – frequently until late at night. Despite his youth, Humboldt often took the lead. He ‘forced us’ into the natural sciences, Goethe enthused, as they talked about zoology and volcanoes, as well as about botany, chemistry and Galvanism. ‘In eight days of reading books, one couldn’t learn as much as what he gives you in an hour,’ Goethe said.

December 1794 was bitterly cold. The frozen Rhine became a thoroughfare for Napoleon’s troops on their warpath through Europe. Deep snow blanketed the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar. But every morning just before sunrise, Humboldt, Goethe and a few other scientific friends trudged through the darkness and snow across Jena’s market square. Wrapped up in thick woollen coats, they passed the sturdy fourteenth-century town hall on their walk to the university where they attended lectures on anatomy. It was freezing in the almost empty auditorium in the medieval round stone tower that was part of the ancient city wall – but the advantage of the unusually low temperatures was that the cadavers they dissected there remained fresh for much longer. Goethe, who hated the cold and normally would have preferred the crackling heat of his stove, could not have been happier. He couldn’t stop talking. Humboldt’s presence stimulated him.