ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT. i 49 



" Epoques de la Nature," his sketches, flowing in splendid word-waves, 

 of men and animals, Bernardin de Saint-Pierre's magnificent pictures 

 of tropical nature, were well fitted to spur Humboldt's literary ambi- 

 tion in emulation of them. If his style has lately been criticised, that 

 shows that he had a style. Indulgence in the creation of beautiful 

 forms of language was agreeable to the taste of his age ; and why 

 should I not tell how he, presuming upon a similar receptivity in my- 

 self, read to me from the proof-sheets of his " Cosmos " passages which 

 particularly pleased him, such as the one in which he ingeniously sum- 

 marizes all that the moon is to our earth ; enlivening the firmament by 

 its changes, comforting the heart with its mild luster, and in geological 

 periods carving out continents through the erosive work of the tides ? 

 More subject to criticism is the other influence which the dominat- 

 ing mind of Humboldt exercised over Germany in his ninetieth year. 

 At nothing are laymen more surprised than when they hear that Hum- 

 boldt did not stand on the extreme height as a naturalist, but that his 

 situation in a mental respect was like that he found himself in on Chim- 

 borazo, when an impassable chasm separated him from the summit. 

 The gap which opened between him and the topmost peak of natural 

 science, was the want of physico-mathematical knowledge. Not that 

 this was denied his talents. He had in his youth an inclination to pure 

 mathematical research. But the taste, and later also the mental habit, 

 of analyzing phenomena within a certain scope and tracing them to 

 their ultimate recognizable principles, deserted him. He became satis- 

 fied with establishing and examining facts. The mere telling, even at 

 large, of those things that occupied his vision, and which he compre- 

 hended to the most minute details, or could deduce at every instant, 

 was tiresome to him. It was, indeed, the cosmos ; only there is, in 

 that highest sense, no scientific comprehension of the cosmos. Mathe- 

 matical physics knows of no difference between cosmos and chaos. By 

 blind natural necessity, by the central forces of atoms independent of 

 time, or by some other equivalent hypothesis of the constitution of 

 matter, it concedes that cosmos may have come out of chaos. The 

 cosmos, the beautiful and harmonious aggregate of nature, is an aes- 

 thetic anthropomorphism. Humboldt explained the title " Cosmos ' 

 with the phrase, " Sketch of a physical description of the universe." 

 According to Herr Gustav Kirchhoff's definition of mechanics, one 

 might easily place these words upon Newton's "Principia" or Laplace's 

 " Mecanique celeste." But, by description, Humboldt understood only 

 a graphic, not a mechanical description, and there is the same differ- 

 ence between his description of the world and that of Newton or La- 

 place as between the description of a plant and the calculation of a dis- 

 turbance. In that he adhered to his conception through his whole life, 

 and attached the highest value to it, he showed himself a genuine child 

 of a stage of discipline more fitted for artistic methods of view than 

 for scientific analysis. 



