Thammasat University students who are interested in science, natural philosophy, literature, history, geography, and related subjects may find a newly available book useful.
Alexander von Humboldt: Perceiving the World is by Professor Beate I. Allert, who teaches German, comparative literature, and film studies at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, the United States of America.
The subject of the book is Alexander von Humboldt, a German geographer, naturalist, and explorer who advanced ideas about Romantic philosophy and science.
The TU Library collection includes other books about Humboldt.
Humboldt’s work on botanical geography established the foundations for the field of biogeography.
His advocacy of long-term systematic geophysical measurement pioneered modern geomagnetic and meteorological monitoring.
Between 1799 and 1804, Humboldt travelled extensively in the Americas, exploring and describing them for the first time from a modern Western scientific point of view.
His description of the journey was written and published in several volumes over 21 years. Humboldt was one of the first people to propose that the lands bordering the Atlantic Ocean were once joined, South America and Africa in particular.
In his multivolume treatise, Cosmos, Humboldt tried to unify diverse branches of scientific knowledge and culture.
This work also motivated a holistic perception of the universe as one interacting entity, which introduced concepts of ecology leading to ideas of environmentalism.
In 1800, and again in 1831, he described scientifically, on the basis of observations generated during his travels, local impacts of development causing human-induced climate change.
Humboldt is seen as the father of ecology and the father of environmentalism.
In his honor, a bay, a river, a glacier, several American towns and counties, and an ocean current were named after him.
Similarly, the Humboldt squid and Humboldt penguin were further tributes.
Charles Darwin, Henry David Thoreau, and John Muir admired his work, as did the poet and naturalist Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
He was also a friend of Simon Bolívar, a Venezuelan military and political leader who led what are currently the countries of Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Panama, and Bolivia to independence from the Spanish Empire.
As the first ecological thinker, Humboldt saw nature as a unified whole made up of complex interrelationships, blending poetry and science.
The noted American poet Muriel Rukeyser wrote of Humboldt in The Life of Poetry (1949):
There is this poetry. There is this science. The farther along the way we go in each, the more clearly the relationship may be perceived, the more prodigal the gifts. The definitions of Western culture have, classically, separated these two disciplines. When Darwin wrote of Humboldt that he displayed the rare union between poetry and science, he set the man in a line of heroes of that meeting-place-a line which includes Lucretius and Goethe and Leonardo, but which for the last centuries has been obscured in the critical structure which insists that the forms of imagination are not only separate, but exclusive.
Here are some thoughts by Humboldt:
Devoted from my earliest youth to the study of nature, feeling with enthusiasm the wild beauties of a country guarded by mountains and shaded by ancient forests, I experienced in my travels, enjoyments which have amply compensated for the privations inseparable from a laborious and often agitated life.
One of the noblest characteristics which distinguish modern civilization from that of remoter times is, that it has enlarged the mass of our conceptions, rendered us more capable of perceiving the connection between the physical and intellectual world, and thrown a more general interest over objects which heretofore occupied only a few scientific men, because those objects were contemplated separately, and from a narrower point of view.
The expression of vanity and self-love becomes less offensive, when it retains something of simplicity and frankness.
Our imagination is struck only by what is great; but the lover of natural philosophy should reflect equally on little things.
In order to ameliorate without commotion new institutions must be made, as it were, to rise out of those which the barbarism of centuries has consecrated. It will one day seem incredible that until the year 1826 there existed no law in the Great Antilles to prevent the sale of young infants and their separation from their parents, or to prohibit the degrading custom of marking the negroes with a hot iron, merely to enable these human cattle to be more easily recognized.
- Equinoctial Regions of America (1814-1829)
The principal impulse by which I was directed was the earnest endeavor to comprehend the phenomena of physical objects in their general connection, and to represent nature as one great whole, moved and animated by internal forces. My intercourse with highly-gifted men early led me to discover that, without an earnest striving to attain to a knowledge of special branches of study, all attempts to give a grand and general view of the universe would be nothing more than a vain illusion. These special departments in the great domain of natural science are, moreover, capable of being reciprocally fructified by means of the appropriative forces by which they are endowed.
While we maintain the unity of the human species, we at the same time repel the depressing assumption of superior and inferior races of men. There are nations more susceptible of cultivation, more highly civilized, more enobled by mental cultivation than others, but none in themselves nobler than others. All are in like degree designed for freedom; a freedom which, in the ruder conditions of society, belongs only to the individual, but which, in social states enjoying political institutions, appertains as a right to the whole body of the community.
From the remotest nebulæ and from the revolving double stars, we have descended to the minutest organisms of animal creation, whether manifested in the depths of ocean or on the surface of our globe, and to the delicate vegetable germs which clothe the naked declivity of the ice-crowned mountain summit; and here we have been able to arrange these phenomena according to partially known laws; but other laws of a more mysterious nature rule the higher spheres of the organic world, in which is comprised the human species in all its varied conformation, its creative intellectual power, and the languages to which it has given existence. A physical delineation of nature terminates at the point where the sphere of intellect begins, and a new world of mind is opened to our view. It marks the limit, but does not pass it.
The most powerful influence exercised by the Arabs on general natural physics was that directed to the advances of chemistry; a science for which this race created a new era.(…) Besides making laudatory mention of that which we owe to the natural science of the Arabs in both the terrestrial and celestial spheres, we must likewise allude to their contributions in separate paths of intellectual development to the general mass of mathematical science.
- Cosmos (1845 – 1847)
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)