The Invention of Nature

Sun, moon, and stars, and beast of chase and prey.

Wordsworth’s friend and fellow poet Coleridge found Humboldt’s work equally stimulating. Coleridge had probably first been introduced to Humboldt’s ideas at Wilhelm and Caroline von Humboldt’s house in Rome, where he had spent time in late 1805. He had met Wilhelm – the ‘brother of the great traveller’, as Coleridge described him – shortly after his arrival. The salon at the Humboldts’ had been alive with Alexander’s tales from South America but also with discussions of his new concept of nature. Back in England, Coleridge began to read Humboldt’s books and copied sections into his notebooks, returning to them when thinking about science and philosophy because he was grappling with similar ideas.

Both Wordsworth and Coleridge were ‘walking poets’ who not only needed to be out in nature but also wrote outdoors. Like Humboldt, who insisted that scientists had to leave their laboratories to truly understand nature, Wordsworth and Coleridge believed that poets had to open the doors of their studies and walk through meadows, over hills and beside rivers. An uneven path, or tangled woods were Coleridge’s preferred places to compose, he claimed. A friend estimated that Wordsworth, by the time he was in his sixties, had covered around 180,000 miles. They were part of nature, searching for the unity within but also between man and his environment.

Like Humboldt, Coleridge admired Immanuel Kant’s philosophy – ‘a truly great man’ as he called him – and enthused initially about Schelling’s Naturphilosophie for its search of unity between the Self and nature – the internal and the external world. It was Schelling’s belief in the role of the creative ‘I’ in the understanding of nature that resonated with Coleridge. Science needed to be infused with imagination or, as Schelling said, they had ‘to give once again wings to physics’.

Fluent in German, Coleridge had for long been immersed in German literature and science.² He had even suggested a translation of Goethe’s masterpiece Faust to Humboldt’s publisher, John Murray. More than any other contemporary play, Faust addressed issues that occupied Coleridge intensely. Heinrich Faust saw how everything hung together: ‘How it all lives and moves and weaves / Into a whole! Each part gives and receives,’ Faust declares in the first scene, a sentence that could have been written by either Humboldt or Coleridge.

Coleridge was lamenting the loss of what he called the ‘connective powers of the understanding’. They lived in an ‘epoch of division and separation’, of fragmentation and the loss of unity. The problem, he insisted, lay with philosophers and scientists such as René Descartes or Carl Linnaeus, who had turned the understanding of nature into a narrow practice of collecting, classification or mathematical abstraction. This ‘philosophy of mechanism’, Coleridge wrote to Wordsworth, ‘strikes Death’. It was the naturalist with his urge to classify, Wordsworth agreed, who was a ‘fingering slave, / One that would peep and botanize / Upon his mother’s grave?’ Coleridge and Wordsworth were turning against the idea of extorting knowledge from nature with ‘screws or levers’ – in Faust’s words – and against the idea of a Newtonian universe made up of inert atoms that followed natural laws like automata. Instead they saw nature as Humboldt did – dynamic, organic and thumping with life.

Coleridge called for a new approach to the sciences in reaction to the loss of the ‘spirit of Nature’. Neither Coleridge nor Wordsworth turned against science itself but against the prevailing ‘microscopic view’. Like Humboldt, they took issue with the division of science into ever more specialized approaches. Coleridge called these philosophers the ‘Little-ists’, while Wordsworth wrote in The Excursion (1814):

For was it meant

That we should pore, and dwindle as we pore,

For ever dimly pore on things minute,

On solitary objects, still beheld

In disconnection dead and spiritless,

And still dividing and dividing still

Break down all grandeur …

Humboldt’s idea of nature as a living organism animated by dynamic forces fell on fertile ground in England. It was the guiding principle and the leading metaphor for the Romantics. Humboldt’s works, the Edinburgh Review wrote, were the best proof of the ‘secret band’ that united all knowledge, feeling and morality. Everything was connected and ‘found to reflect on each other’.