The Invention of Nature

By the time of Humboldt’s birth, Prussia was known for its huge standing army and administrative efficiency. Frederick the Great had ruled as an absolute monarch but nevertheless introduced some reforms including a system of primary schooling and modest agrarian reform. First steps had also been taken towards religious tolerance in Prussia. Famed for his military prowess, Frederick the Great had been known for his love of music, philosophy and learning too. And though French and English contemporaries often dismissed the Germans as coarse and backward, there were more universities and libraries in the German states than anywhere else in Europe. As publishing and periodicals boomed, literacy rates soared.

Meanwhile Britain was marching ahead economically. Agricultural innovations such as crop rotation and new irrigation systems brought greater yields. The British were gripped by ‘canal fever’, lacing their island with a modern transport system. The Industrial Revolution had brought power looms and other machines, and manufacturing centres were mushrooming into cities. Husbandmen in Britain were turning from subsistence farming to feeding those living and working in the new urban centres.

Man began to control nature with new technologies such as James Watt’s steam engines and also with new medical advances as the first people were inoculated against smallpox in Europe and North America. When Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning rod in the mid-eighteenth century, humankind began to tame what had been regarded as expressions of God’s fury. With such power, man lost his fear of nature.

For the previous two centuries western society had been dominated by the idea that nature functioned like a complex apparatus – a ‘great and complicated Machine of the Universe’, as one scientist had said. After all, if man could make intricate clocks and automata, what great things could God create? According to the French philosopher René Descartes and his followers, God had given this mechanical world its initial push, while Isaac Newton regarded the universe more like a divine clockwork, with God as the maker continuing to intervene.

Inventions such as telescopes and microscopes revealed new worlds and with them a belief that the laws of nature could be discovered. In Germany the philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz had in the late seventeenth century propounded ideas of a universal science based on mathematics. Meanwhile in Cambridge, Newton had been uncovering the mechanics of the universe by applying mathematics to nature. As a result, the world began to be seen as reassuringly predictable, as long as humankind could comprehend those natural laws.

Maths, objective observation and controlled experiments paved this path of reason across the western world. Scientists became citizens of their self-proclaimed ‘republic of letters’, an intellectual community that transcended national boundaries, religion and language. As their letters zigzagged across Europe and the Atlantic, scientific discoveries and new ideas spread. This ‘republic of letters’ was a country without borders, ruled by reason and not by monarchs. It was in this new Age of Enlightenment that Alexander von Humboldt was raised, with western societies seemingly striding forward along a trajectory of confidence and improvement. With progress as the century’s watchword, every generation envied the next. No one worried that nature itself might be destroyed.

As young men, Alexander and Wilhelm von Humboldt joined Berlin’s intellectual circles, where they discussed the importance of education, of tolerance and of independent reasoning. As the brothers dashed from reading groups to philosophical salons in Berlin, learning, previously such a solitary occupation in Tegel, now became social. During the summers their mother often stayed behind in Tegel, leaving the two young brothers with their tutors at the family’s house in Berlin. But this freedom was not to last: their mother made it clear that she expected them to become civil servants. Financially dependent on her, they had to accede to her wishes.