188 ALEXANDER VON HUMBOLDT. 



takes a keen, intelligent interest in the subject under discussion, 

 r ases every dormant idea, exacts from everyone a careful 

 precision of expression, guards against one-sidedness of view, 

 and shows his appreciation of every effort to render the meaning 

 clear by the remarkable aptitude with which he seizes and 

 weighs the thoughts expressed. Agreeable as this quality is 

 to those who have a rich store of thought to communicate, 

 to him it is almost indispensable to be set in action by some- 

 -thing from without which shall yield him material upon which 

 to exercise his intellectual powers ; for he has no originality, 

 he can only analyse and combine. He is too often deficient in 

 a passive and unpretending surrender of himself to the subject 

 under consideration ; he is at once too active and too restlessly 

 intent on certain conclusions. You know him well, however, 

 and no doubt sympathise with me in this opinion. ... As to 

 Alexander, I have not been able to form any satisfactory judg- 

 ment of him ; I fear, however, notwithstanding his great talents 

 and restless activity, he will never accomplish anything truly 

 great in science. A trivial, restless vanity is the 'main-spring 

 of all his actions. } I have not been able to discover in him a 

 spark of pure objective interest in outward things ; and, however 

 strange it may appear, with all the wealth of material that he 

 possesses, he seems to me to show a poverty of intellect very 

 disastrous to the subject he handles. His is that keen, cold 

 reason which would have all nature, which is always incompre- 

 hensible, and should be in every point reverenced as unfathom- 

 able, shamelessly exposed to scrutiny ; and with an effrontery I 

 cannot comprehend he employs his formulae, which are frequently 

 only mere words and always narrow in conception, as a universal 

 standard. He seems to me, in short, to possess an organism far 

 too dense for the object he has in view, and is besides much too 

 circumscribed in understanding. He has no imagination, and 

 is therefore deficient, in my opinion, in the very faculty most 

 necessary for his scientific labours, for the same susceptibility 

 of temperament is needed for the contemplation of Nature in 

 her smallest phenomena as in the grandest of her laws. Alex- 



1 These words, as well as those in italics in the following page, are 

 omitted in the published correspondence of Schiller and Korner, and are 

 here given for the first time as they stand in the original manuscript. 



