Sublime

Alexander von Humboldt—Friedrich Wilhelm Karl Heinrich Alexander von Humboldt—or Baron von Humboldt, as he was commonly addressed. He had been born in Berlin on September 14, 1769, the second son of a middle-aged army officer, a minor figure in the court of Frederick the Great, and of a rather solemn, domineering young woman of Huguenot descent who

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The young Latin American intellectual Simón Bolívar had sought him out in Rome one year to talk about political freedom. John Charles Frémont, who regarded Humboldt as a god, had gone off exploring and sprinkled Humboldt’s name all over the map of Nevada. John Bachman would say that his own interest in natural history began with meeting Humboldt at

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He would be regarded as the incomparable high priest of nineteenth-century science—a towering godlike inspiration to such a disparate assortment of individuals as John Charles Frémont, John James Audubon, John Lloyd Stephens, Sir Charles Lyell, Simón Bolívar, W. H. Hudson, William Hickling Prescott, Edward Whymper, Charles Darwin, Louis Agassiz. Da

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During much of his long life, he was the nexus of the scientific world, writing some 50,000 letters and receiving at least double that number. Knowledge, Humboldt believed, had to be shared, exchanged and made available to everybody.

But knowledge, for Humboldt, wasn’t merely an intellectual faculty — it was an embodied, holistic presence with life ... See more

In 1869, in Boston, on the 100th anniversary of Humboldt’s birth, Agassiz, by then America’s most renowned naturalist, would recount in a long speech the incredible life of his mentor, the monumental productivity right up until the end, the trip to the Urals in 1829, the historic series of lectures in Berlin, the friendship with Goethe, the new car

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In a world where we tend to draw a sharp line between the sciences and the arts, between the subjective and the objective, Humboldt’s insight that we can only truly understand nature by using our imagination makes him a visionary.