60 ALEXANDEK VON HUMBOLDT. 



These multifarious occupations prevented him attending- 

 the lectures delivered by Moritz on the ^Esthetic in Art 

 lectures which at that time were setting the whole of Berlin 

 in a furore for aesthetics and he relates to Wegener in March 

 1789 : 'Moritz commenced his course of lectures about three 

 weeks ago, in the hall of the Academy of Arts, and they excite 

 universal applause. Among his audience may be counted from 

 fifteen to twenty of the most distinguished ladies of Berlin, 

 and the minister Heinitz, Count Neale, and numbers of the 

 court officials attend with the greatest regularity, never missing 

 a lecture. They are certainly the most brilliant lectures that 

 have ever been delivered in Grermany. I attended one of 

 them. His delivery is dignified and fluent, but somewhat too 

 declamatory. As for the matter of the discourse, it was a 

 strange mixture of brilliant errors, ... for example: "One being- 

 passes into another; an inferior organisation, by becoming ab- 

 sorbed into a superior one, is raised to perfection. Animals live 

 upon grass, mankind live upon animals ; therefore vegetable 

 life must rise gradually through animal life till it attain the 

 highest form in human life." On hearing these words, one of 

 the marshals of the court exclaimed, " II est sublime! " What 

 a mixture of materialism and monadology ! l An actual feast of 

 monads ! Again : " Nature created man in order to see her 

 own perfections in him." But, notwithstanding all, he mani- 

 fests much acuteness of intellect and some real flashes of 

 genius. Little as I felt disposed to approve his propositions 

 on the beautiful, I listened to Moritz with pleasure. His elo- 

 quence is fascinating, and is the secret of his popularity.' 



In the active correspondence that ensued between Hum- 

 boldt and Wegener, reference could not fail to be made occa- 

 sionally to the events occurring in the capital, especially when 

 those events were of a nature to mark the history of the 

 advancement of civilisation. On one of these occasions he 

 thus writes : 



1 [The science of monads : an important part of the philosophy of Leibnitz, 

 who taught that all bodies are compounded of certain primary consti- 

 tuents, to which, as simple substances without parts, he gave the name of 

 monads.] 



