

WEIMAK AND JENA. 197 





decided manner. He followed Bacon's precept, which he often 

 called to mind during the undertakings he was at that time 

 engaged upon that nature should first be observed, and as 

 many of her phenomena as possible collated. His method 

 consisted in ' assembling mere facts, and never admitting any- 

 thing which lay beyond the boundary of actual experience.' 



6 Facts,' he writes to Blumenbach, in the year 1795, 'facts 

 remain ever the same, when the hastily-erected edifice of 

 theory has long since fallen in ruins. I have always kept my 

 facts distinct from my conjectures. This method of dealing 

 with the phenomena of nature appears to me to be the one 

 best grounded, and the most likely to succeed.' He gives ex- 

 pression to the same sentiments in a letter to Pictet of Geneva, 

 dated from Bayreuth, January 24, 1796 : ' I have been drawing 

 up a scheme for a universal science ; but the more I feel its 

 need, the more I perceive how slight the foundations yet are 



for so vast an edifice I shall confine myself, however, 



to giving you the facts that have hitherto escaped the notice 

 of men of science. For in every branch of physical knowledge 

 there is nothing stable and certain but facts. Theories are 

 as variable as the opinions that give them birth. They are 

 the meteors of the moral world, rarely productive of good, 

 and more often hurtful to the intellectual progress of man- 

 kind.' l 



It is remarkable that, at the very time that Schiller was 

 pronouncing his severe judgment upon Humboldt, Fourcroy, 

 the physicist of Paris, was giving expression to a not less severe 

 criticism upon opposite grounds, namely, that he experimented 

 too little and built too much upon the experiments he made. 

 Almost at the same time that Schiller wrote his criticism, 

 Fourcroy, in alluding to the epistolary treatise ' Sur le Precede 

 chimique de la Vitalite,' which Humboldt had addressed to 

 Van Mons at Brussels in December 1796, remarked : c I think 

 Herr Humboldt is a little rash in his conclusions ; it seems to 

 me he will be obliged to abandon some of his views. I fear that 

 he admits too many hypotheses, and does not repeat an experi- 

 ment sufficiently often before basing a theory upon it.' 



1 Millin, 'Magaz. encyclop./ vol. vi. p. 462 5 reprinted in De la Bo- 

 quette, f Humboldt, Correspondance, etc./ vol. i. p, 4, 



