WEIMAR AND JENA. 203 



mation including, were such a thing possible, the whole 

 range of modern science, whose knowledge is not confined 

 merely to the present generation and its immediate predecessor, 

 but extends also to the past century, so important in the 

 world's history if a genius of such universality would put this 

 new theory to the proof, how soon might its fate be de- 

 cided, and how greatly would this further the development of 

 thought I 



6 Reason and experience can never be more than apparently 

 opposed, and I have therefore a firm conviction that you 

 will not fail to notice the most surprising agreement between 

 theory and experiment in many points of the new philosophy. 

 Your mind has in an empirical age so daringly overstepped 

 the boundaries prescribed to physics, that you must be already 

 acquainted with the bold views of the present theory. If, 

 true to your character of an empirical scientific investi- 

 gator, you have, with the exercise of a prudential reserve, 

 admitted only such ideas into your works as are confirmed by 

 experience, you will not on this account deem them of less 

 value because they have received through philosophy the sanc- 

 tion of reason.' . . . 



To this Humboldt replied in a letter dated Paris, February 

 1, 1805: 



. . . . ' You will doubtless have heard from Herr W. how 

 desirous I am to adopt all that is great and beautiful in the 

 new system of philosophy which you have been propounding 

 during the last few years. What, in truth, could have more 

 completely roused my attention than such a revolution occur- 

 ring in the study of those sciences to the pursuit of which my 

 whole life is devoted ? After being absent from Europe for six 

 years, without books, and closely occupied with nature, my 

 mind has been kept more free from prejudice than was possible 

 to most physicists, who, through the deleterious effects produced 

 by literary disputes, have become more attached to their former 

 interpretations of nature than to the object of their study 

 nature herself. No ! I regard the revolution which you have 

 produced in science as one of the happiest events of these 

 impetuous times. 



