ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT. H7 



ment and gushing philanthropy from France. German society now 

 acquired a strong literary interest. But while that part of the edu- 

 cated world which was susceptible to the more tender emotions led 

 an aesthetic dream-life, the stronger minds were chained to the con- 

 templation of the antique, or were sunk in the profundities of the 

 simultaneously ripened critical philosophy. Thus the thought of the 

 nation was far removed from realities, and directed toward beautiful 

 fancies and ideal truths. If this had had the result of only diverting 

 some from research and observation, the loss might have been borne. 

 But, with the thoroughness with which the German does everything, 

 the damage went deeper. The distinctions between aesthetic and scien- 

 tific demands were effaced from the universal comprehension. The 

 intuitions of art usurped the place of induction and deduction. Even 

 the critique of the reason, just achieved by Kant, was pushed aside as 

 narrow-minded scholasticism. An arrogant speculation believed its 

 synthetic judgments a priori had grown so strong that it could under- 

 take to construct the world from a few delusive formulas, and it looked 

 down with extreme insolence upon the unpretentious daily work of the 

 empiric. In short, the day came of that false philosophy which re- 

 dounded to the shame of German science for a quarter of a century, 

 whose advocates threatened our own generation, and which the best 

 heads, elevating vague fancy and taste above the practical, were least 

 able to resist. 



The recollection of this perversion of the German mind is the more 

 mortifying because it occurred simultaneously with the brightest 

 phases of science outside of Germany, especially in France. While 

 under the first republic and the first empire the muses were hushed to 

 silence, there was gathered in Paris a circle of learned men of whom 

 not only has each one left a bright trace behind him, but also in which 

 as a whole lived the comprehension of the true method to which the 

 Academy of Sciences has always persistently adhered. Coulomb and 

 Lavoisier, Laplace and Cuvier, Biot and Arago, were partly the fore- 

 runners, partly the coryphees of that great epoch from which is dated 

 the leadership which, during the first half of this century, made Paris 

 the scientific capital. 



The period of this momentous transformation in Germany, when 

 aesthetic contemplation of the world and overweening speculation were 

 mutually crowning each other and pushing intelligent experiment, like 

 Cinderella, into a corner this period was that of Alexander von Hum- 

 boldt's youth. A remarkable youth he must have been, exuberant of 

 thought, and yet burning with the thirst for action ; eloquent and en- 

 thusiastic like a poet, and yet devoted with all his mind to the study of 

 Nature; in knowledge already a reflection of the Cosmos, and yet inde- 

 fatigable in accurate examination and experiment ; a born master of 

 the German speech, yet at home in every idiom ; in such guise he ap- 

 peared in the intellectual center of the Germany of the day, in Jena, 



