ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT. 157 



fully grasping the tragic fate of Calas, Sirven, and De la Barre, Hum- 

 boldt in happier times only summoning his force to obtain a salary for 

 poor Eisenstein, or to prosecute Haupt's appeal ; the fame of both 

 suffering from the fact that their teachings and discoveries having 

 long ago become common property, only a few know whom to thank 

 for them ; finally, both in extreme old age glowing " with that youth 

 which never forsakes us," and active to the latest breath ; Voltaire 

 busy with his " Irene " and the " Dictionnaire de l'Academie," Hum- 

 boldt with the " Cosmos." What the " Experiments on Excited Mus- 

 cular and Nervous Fibers " was for the youth Humboldt, and the 

 " Travels " and " Views of Nature " for the man, the " Cosmos " was for 

 the old man. We have already questioned the fundamental thought 

 of this famous book from the point of view of theoretical natural his- 

 tory, and of the doctrine of the persistence of force. We have frequent- 

 ly entertained the query whether such a mixture of styles as rules 

 in it is correct or not. It certainly is not becoming to the naturalist. 

 But it is clear that it is exactly this form of representation that makes 

 possible the immense influence of the book, that has over the whole 

 inhabited earth prompted hundreds of thousands to join in asking 

 questions they had not thought of before ; that, particularly in Ger- 

 many, lifted the ban under which natural science had lain in the ideas of 

 the cultivated, as if it were a domain from which common men were 

 excluded, and were accessible only to a few particularly qualified to 

 enter it, and about which one need not be concerned unless he have 

 some special inclination or calling for it. It has been remarked that 

 by science the French understand only natural science, by Wissen- 

 schaft the Germans only mental science. Goethe's scientific efforts, in 

 consequence of their semi-aesthetic character, their desultoriness, and 

 the bitter hostility he showed to all associated research, could not 

 change the case. If it is now different, and the state recognizes the 

 full importance of science, it is, of course, immediately the result of 

 the technical triumphs science has achieved. But the turn for the 

 better we ascribe originally to the Cosmos-lectures, which, for the first 

 time in Germany, led a cultivated German audience to imagine that 

 there was something else in the world than belles-lettres and music, 

 than the " Morgenblatt " and Henrietta Sonntag. And although Hum- 

 boldt himself, as we have already said, did not rise to the very apex 

 of science, it was, nevertheless, this less exalted height at which he 

 stopped that permitted him to make himself comprehensible to the 

 ordinary children of men. 



While, indeed, he was not as sublime as Newton or Laplace, while 

 he did not mirror one side of the world in absolute perfection like 

 Gauss, he was able to make an entrance among the multitude for the 

 truths discovered by those archangels of science. While he shared 

 with them the universal human feeling for the beautiful in sublime 

 things, he was incited to project a " picture of Nature," at the risk that 



