The Invention of Nature

2

Imagination and Nature

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Humboldt

IN 1794 ALEXANDER VON Humboldt briefly interrupted his experiments and his mining inspection tours to visit his brother, Wilhelm, who now lived with his wife Caroline and their two young children in Jena, some 150 miles south-west of Berlin. Jena was a town of only 4,000 people that lay within the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar, a small state that was headed by an enlightened ruler, Karl August. It was a centre of learning and literature that within a few years was to become the birthplace of German Idealism and Romanticism. The University of Jena had become one of the largest and most famous in the German-speaking regions, attracting progressive thinkers from across the other more repressive German states because of its liberal attitude. There was no other place, said the resident poet and playwright Friedrich Schiller, where liberty and truth ruled so much.

Fifteen miles from Jena was Weimar, the state’s capital, and the home of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Germany’s greatest poet. Weimar had fewer than 1,000 houses and was said to be so small that everybody knew everybody. Cattle were driven through the cobbled streets and the post was delivered so irregularly that it was easier for Goethe to send a letter to his friend Schiller, who worked at the university in Jena, with his greengrocer on her delivery rounds rather than wait for the mail coach.

In Jena and Weimar, one visitor said, the brightest minds came together like the sunrays in a magnifying glass. Wilhelm and Caroline had moved to Jena in spring 1794 and were part of the circle of friends around Goethe and Schiller. They lived on the market square opposite Schiller – so close that they could wave out of the window to arrange their daily meetings. When Alexander arrived, Wilhelm dispatched a quick note to Weimar, inviting Goethe to Jena. Goethe was happy to come and stayed, as always, in his guest rooms at the duke’s castle, not far away from the market square, just a couple of blocks north.

During Humboldt’s visit, the men met every day. They made a lively group. There were noisy discussions and roaring laughter – frequently until late at night. Despite his youth, Humboldt often took the lead. He ‘forced us’ into the natural sciences, Goethe enthused, as they talked about zoology and volcanoes, as well as about botany, chemistry and Galvanism. ‘In eight days of reading books, one couldn’t learn as much as what he gives you in an hour,’ Goethe said.

December 1794 was bitterly cold. The frozen Rhine became a thoroughfare for Napoleon’s troops on their warpath through Europe. Deep snow blanketed the Duchy of Saxe-Weimar. But every morning just before sunrise, Humboldt, Goethe and a few other scientific friends trudged through the darkness and snow across Jena’s market square. Wrapped up in thick woollen coats, they passed the sturdy fourteenth-century town hall on their walk to the university where they attended lectures on anatomy. It was freezing in the almost empty auditorium in the medieval round stone tower that was part of the ancient city wall – but the advantage of the unusually low temperatures was that the cadavers they dissected there remained fresh for much longer. Goethe, who hated the cold and normally would have preferred the crackling heat of his stove, could not have been happier. He couldn’t stop talking. Humboldt’s presence stimulated him.

Then in his mid-forties, Goethe was Germany’s most celebrated literary figure. Exactly two decades previously, he had been catapulted to international fame with The Sorrows of Young Werther, a novel about a forlorn lover who commits suicide, which had encapsulated the sentimentality of that time. It became the book of a whole generation and many identified with the eponymous protagonist. The novel was published in most European languages and became so popular that countless men, including young Karl August, the Duke of Saxe-Weimar, had dressed in a Werther uniform consisting of a yellow waistcoat and breeches, blue tailcoat, brown boots and round felt hat. People talked of Werther fever and the Chinese even produced Werther porcelain aimed at the European market.

When Goethe first met Humboldt, he was no longer the dazzling young poet of the Sturm und Drang, the era of ‘Storm and Stress’. This German pre-Romantic period had celebrated individuality and a full spectrum of extreme feelings – from dramatic love to deep melancholy – all filled with passion, emotions, romantic poems and novels. In 1775, when Goethe had first been invited to Weimar by the then eighteen-year-old Karl August, he had embarked on a long round of love affairs, drunkenness and pranks. Goethe and Karl August had roistered through the streets of Weimar, sometimes wrapped in white sheets to scare those who believed in ghosts. They had stolen barrels from a local merchant to roll down hills, and flirted with peasant girls – all in the name of genius and freedom. And, of course, no one could complain since Karl August, the young ruler, was involved. But those wild years were long gone, and with them the theatrical declamations of love, the tears, the smashing of glasses and naked swimming that had scandalized the locals. In 1788, six years before Humboldt’s first visit, Goethe had shocked Weimar society one more time when he had taken the uneducated Christiane Vulpius as his lover. Christiane, who worked as a seamstress in Weimar, gave birth to their son August less than two years later. Ignoring convention and malicious gossip, Christiane and August lived with Goethe.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe in 1787 (Illustration Credit 2.1)

By the time Goethe met Humboldt, he had calmed down and grown corpulent, with a double chin and a stomach cruelly described by one acquaintance as ‘that of a woman in the last stages of pregnancy’. His looks had gone – his beautiful eyes had disappeared into the ‘fat of his cheeks’ and many remarked that he was no longer a dashing ‘Apollo’. Goethe was still the confidant of and adviser to the Duke of Saxe-Weimar who had ennobled him (thus the ‘von’ in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s name). He was the director of the court theatre and held several well-paid administrative positions which included the control of the duchy’s mines and manufacturing. Like Humboldt, Goethe adored geology (and mining) – so much so that on special occasions he dressed his young son in a miner’s uniform.

Goethe had become the Zeus of Germany’s intellectual circles, towering above all other poets and writers, but he could also be a ‘cold, mono-syllabled God’. Some described him as melancholic, others as arrogant, proud and bitter. Goethe had never been a great listener if the topic was not to his liking and could end a discussion with a blatant display of his lack of interest or by abruptly changing the subject. He was sometimes so rude particularly to young poets and thinkers that they regularly ran out of the room. None of this mattered to his admirers. The ‘sacred poetic fire’, as one British visitor to Weimar said, had only burned to perfection in Homer, Cervantes, Shakespeare and now it did so in Goethe.

But Goethe wasn’t happy. ‘No one was more isolated than I was then.’ He was more fascinated by nature – ‘the great Mother’ – than by people. His large house in Weimar’s town centre reflected his tastes and status. It was elegantly furnished, filled with art and Italian statues but also with vast collections of rocks, fossils and dried plants. At the back of the house was a suite of plainer rooms that Goethe used as his study and library, overlooking a garden that he had designed for scientific study. In one corner of the garden was the small building that housed his huge geological collection.

Goethe’s house in Weimar (Illustration Credit 2.2)

His favourite place, though, was his Garden House near the River Ilm, outside the old city walls on the duke’s estate. Just a ten-minute walk from his main residence, this small cosy house had been his first home in Weimar, but now it was his refuge where he withdrew from the continuous stream of visitors. Here he wrote, gardened or welcomed his most intimate friends. Vines and sweet-scented honeysuckle climbed along the walls and windows. There were vegetable plots, a meadow with fruit trees and a long path lined with Goethe’s beloved hollyhocks. When Goethe had first moved there in 1776, he had not only planted his own garden but had also convinced the duke to transform the castle’s formal baroque garden into a fashionable English landscape park where irregularly planted groves of trees gave a natural feel.

Goethe ‘was getting tired of the world’. The Reign of Terror in France had turned the initial idealism of the 1789 revolution into a bloody reality of mass executions of tens of thousands of so-called enemies of the revolution. This brutality, along with the ensuing violence that the Napoleonic Wars spread across Europe, had disillusioned Goethe, putting him in the ‘most melancholic mood’. As armies marched through Europe, he worried about the threats that faced Germany. He lived like a hermit, he said, and the only thing that kept him going was his scientific studies. Science for him was like a ‘plank in a shipwreck’.

Today Goethe is famed for his literary works but he was a passionate scientist too, fascinated by the formation of the earth as well as botany. He had a rock collection that eventually numbered 18,000 specimens. As Europe descended into war, he quietly worked on comparative anatomy and optics. In the year of Humboldt’s first visit, he established a botanical garden at the University of Jena. He wrote an essay, the Metamorphosis of Plants, in which he argued that there was an archetypal, or primordial, form underlying the world of plants. The idea was that each plant was the variation of such an urform. Behind variety was unity. According to Goethe, the leaf was this urform, the basic shape from which all others had developed – the petals, the calyx and so on. ‘Forwards and backwards the plant is always nothing but leaf,’ he said.

These were exciting ideas, but Goethe had no scientific sparring partner with whom to develop his theories. All that changed when he met Humboldt. It was as if Humboldt ignited the spark that had been missing for so long. When Goethe was with Humboldt, his mind worked in all directions. He pulled out old notebooks, books and drawings. Papers piled up on the table as they discussed botanical and zoological theories. They scribbled, sketched and read. Goethe was not interested in classification but in the forces that shaped animals and plants, he explained. He distinguished between the internal force – the urform – that provided the general form of a living organism and the environment – the external force – that shaped the organism itself. A seal, for example, had a body adapted to its sea habitat (the external force), Goethe said, but at the same time its skeleton displayed the same general pattern (the internal force) as those of land mammals. Like the French naturalist Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and later Charles Darwin, Goethe recognized that animals and plants adapted to their environment. The urform, he wrote, could be found in all living organisms in different stages of metamorphosis – even between animals and humans.

Listening to Goethe talk with such breathless enthusiasm about his scientific ideas, Humboldt advised him to publish his theories on comparative anatomy. And so Goethe began to work at a frenzied pace, spending the early morning hours dictating to an assistant in his bedroom. Still in bed, propped up on pillows and wrapped in blankets to keep out the cold, Goethe worked more intensely than he had for years. There wasn’t much time because by 10 a.m. Humboldt arrived and their discussions continued.

It was during this period that Goethe began to fling both his arms around whenever he went for a walk – provoking alarmed glances from his neighbours. He had discovered, he finally explained to a friend, that this exaggerated swinging of one’s arms was a remnant from the four-legged animal – and therefore one of the proofs that animals and humans had a common ancestor. ‘That’s how I walk more naturally,’ he said, and couldn’t have cared less if Weimar society regarded this rather strange behaviour as unrefined.

Over the next few years, Humboldt regularly travelled to Jena and Weimar whenever he found time. Humboldt and Goethe went on long walks and dined together. They conducted experiments and inspected the new botanical garden in Jena. An invigorated Goethe moved easily from one topic to another: ‘early morning corrected poem, then anatomy of frogs’ was a typical entry in his diary during one of Humboldt’s visits. Humboldt was making him dizzy with ideas, Goethe told a friend. He had never met anyone so versatile. Humboldt’s drive, Goethe said, ‘whipped the scientific things’ with such speed that it was sometimes hard to follow.

Three years after his first visit, Humboldt arrived in Jena for a three-month break. Once again Goethe joined him there. Instead of going back and forth to Weimar, Goethe moved to his rooms at the Old Castle in Jena for a few weeks. Humboldt wanted to conduct a long series of experiments on ‘animal electricity’ because he was trying to finish his book on the subject. Almost every day – often with Goethe – Humboldt walked the short distance from his brother’s house to the university. He spent six or seven hours in the anatomy theatre as well as lecturing on the subject.

When a violent thunderstorm hit the area one warm spring day, Humboldt dashed outside to set up his instruments in order to measure the electricity in the atmosphere. As the rain lashed down and thunder reverberated across the fields, the small town was illuminated by a wild dance of lightning. Humboldt was in his element. The next day, when he heard that a farmer and his wife had been killed by the lightning, he rushed over to obtain their corpses. Laying out their bodies on the table in the round anatomy tower, he analysed everything: the man’s leg bones looked as if they had been ‘pierced by shotgun pellets!’, Humboldt noted excitedly, but the worst damage was to the genitals. At first he thought that the pubic hair might have ignited and caused the burns, but dismissed the idea when he saw the couple’s unharmed armpits. Despite the increasingly putrid smell of death and burned flesh, Humboldt enjoyed every minute of this gruesome investigation. ‘I cannot exist without experiments,’ he said.

Humboldt’s favourite experiment was one that he and Goethe discovered together by chance. One morning Humboldt placed a frog’s leg on a glass plate and connected its nerves and muscles to different metals in sequence – to silver, gold, iron, zinc and so on – but generated only a discouraging gentle twitch in the leg. When he then leaned over the leg in order to check the connecting metals, it convulsed so violently that it leapt off the table. Both men were stunned, until Humboldt realized that it had been the moisture of his breath that had triggered the reaction. As the tiny droplets in his breath had touched the metals they had created an electric current that had moved the frog’s leg. It was the most magical experiment he had ever carried out, Humboldt decided, because by exhaling on to the frog’s leg it was as if he were ‘breathing life into it’. It was the perfect metaphor for the emergence of the new life sciences.

In this context they also discussed the theories of Humboldt’s former professor, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, about the forces that shaped organisms – the so-called ‘formative drive’ and ‘vital forces’. Fascinated, Goethe then applied these ideas to his own about the urform. The formative drive, Goethe wrote, triggered the development of certain parts in the urform. The snake, for example, has an endlessly long neck because ‘neither matter nor force’ had been wasted on arms or legs. By contrast, the lizard has a shorter neck because it also has legs, while the frog has an even shorter neck because its legs are longer. Goethe then went on to explain his belief that – contrary to Descartes’s theory that animals were machines – a living organism consisted of parts that only function as a unified whole. To put it simply, a machine could be dismantled and then assembled again, while the parts of a living organism worked only in relation to each other. In a mechanical system the parts shaped the whole while in an organic system the whole shaped the parts.

Humboldt widened this concept. And although his own theories of ‘animal electricity’ were eventually proved wrong, they did give him the foundation of what would become his new understanding of nature.¹ Whereas Blumenbach and other scientists applied the idea of forces to organisms, Humboldt applied them to nature on a much broader level – interpreting the natural world as a unified whole that is animated by interactive forces. This new way of thinking changed his approach. If everything was connected, then it was important to examine the differences and similarities without ever losing sight of the whole. Comparison became Humboldt’s primary means of understanding nature, not abstract mathematics or numbers.

Goethe was captivated, reporting to his friends how much he admired the young man’s intellectual virtuosity. It was telling that Humboldt’s presence in Jena coincided with one of Goethe’s most productive phases in years. Not only did he join Humboldt in the anatomy tower but Goethe was also composing his epic poem Hermann and Dorothea and returning to his theories on optics and colour. He examined insects, dissected worms and snails and continued his studies in geology. His days and nights were now occupied with work. ‘Our little academy’, as Goethe called it, was very busy. Wilhelm von Humboldt was working on a verse translation of one of Aeschylus’s Greek tragedies which he discussed with Goethe. With Alexander, Goethe set up an optical apparatus to analyse light and investigated the luminescence of phosphor. In the afternoons or evenings they sometimes met at Wilhelm’s and Caroline’s house but more often assembled at Friedrich Schiller’s house on the market square, where Goethe recited his poems and others presented their own work until late at night. Goethe was so exhausted that he admitted to almost looking forward to a few peaceful days in Weimar ‘to recover’.

Alexander von Humboldt’s pursuit of knowledge was so infectious, Goethe told Schiller, that his own scientific interests had been woken from hibernation. Schiller, though, worried that Goethe was being pulled too far away from poetry and aesthetics. All this was Humboldt’s fault, Schiller believed. Schiller also thought that Humboldt would never accomplish anything great because he dabbled in too many subjects. Humboldt was only interested in measurements and, despite the richness of his knowledge, his work displayed a ‘poverty of meaning’. Schiller remained a lone, negative voice. Even the friend he confided in disagreed: yes, Humboldt was enthusiastic about measurements but these were the building blocks for his wider understanding of nature.

After a month in Jena, Goethe returned to Weimar but quickly missed his new-found stimulation and immediately invited Humboldt to visit. Five days later Humboldt arrived in Weimar and stayed for a week. The first evening Goethe kept his guest to himself but on the next day they had lunch at the castle with Karl August followed by a big dinner party at Goethe’s house. Goethe showed off what Weimar had to offer: he took Humboldt to see the landscape paintings in the duke’s collections, as well as some geological specimens that had just arrived from Russia. Almost every day they went for meals at the castle, where Karl August invited Humboldt to conduct some experiments to entertain his guests. Humboldt had to oblige but he thought the time spent at court was utterly wasted.

For the next month, until Humboldt’s final departure from Jena, Goethe commuted between his house in Weimar and his rooms in the castle in Jena. They read natural history books together, and went out for long walks. In the evening they shared meals and reviewed the latest philosophical texts. They now often met at Schiller’s newly bought Garden House, just outside the city walls. Schiller’s garden was bordered by a little river at the back where the men sat in a small arbour. A round stone table in the middle was laden with glasses and plates of food but also with books and papers. The weather was glorious and they enjoyed the mild early summer evenings. At night, they could only hear the gurgling of the stream and the song of the nightingale. They talked about ‘art, nature and the mind’, as Goethe wrote in his diary.

Schiller (left) with Wilhelm and Alexander von Humboldt and Goethe in Schiller’s garden in Jena (Illustration Credit 2.3)

The ideas they discussed were engaging scientists and thinkers across Europe: the question of how to understand nature. Broadly speaking, two schools of thought vied for dominance: rationalism and empiricism. Rationalists tended to believe that all knowledge came from reason and rational thought, while the empiricists argued that one could ‘know’ the world only through experience. Empiricists insisted that there was nothing in the mind that had not come from the senses. Some went so far as to say that at birth the human mind was like a blank piece of paper without any preconceived ideas – and that over a lifetime it filled up with knowledge that came from sensory experience alone. For the sciences this meant that the empiricists always had to test their theories against observations and with experiments, while the rationalists could base a thesis on logic and reason.

A few years before Humboldt first met Goethe, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant had declared a philosophical revolution that he had boldly claimed was as radical as that of Copernicus some 250 years previously. Kant took up a position between rationalism and empiricism. The laws of nature as we understand them, Kant wrote in his famous Critique of Pure Reason, only existed because our mind interpreted them. Just as Copernicus had concluded that the sun couldn’t be moving around us, so, Kant said, we had to completely change our understanding of how we made sense of nature.

The dualism between the external and the internal world had preoccupied philosophers for millennia. It was a question that asks: Is the tree that I’m seeing in my garden the idea of that tree or the real tree? For a scientist such as Humboldt who was trying to understand nature, this was the most important question. Humans were like citizens of two worlds, occupying both the world of the Ding an sich (the thing-in-itself) which was the external world, and the internal world of one’s perception (how things ‘appeared’ to individuals). According to Kant, the ‘thing-in-itself’ could never be truly known, while the internal world was always subjective.

What Kant brought to the table was the so-called transcendental level: the concept that when we experience an object, it becomes a ‘thing-as-it-appears-to-us’. Our senses as much as our reason are like tinted spectacles through which we perceive the world. Though we may believe that the way we order and understand nature is based on pure reason – upon classification, the laws of motion and so on – Kant believed that this order was shaped by our mind, through those tinted spectacles. We impose this order on nature, and not nature upon us. And with this the ‘Self’ became the creative ego – almost like a lawgiver of nature even if it meant that we could never have a ‘true’ knowledge of the ‘thing-in-itself’. The result was that the emphasis was shifting towards the Self.

There was more that interested Humboldt. One of Kant’s most popular lecture series at the university in Königsberg (today’s Kaliningrad in Russia but then part of Prussia) was on geography. Over forty years, Kant taught this lecture series forty-eight times. In his Physische Geographie, as the series was called, Kant insisted that knowledge was a systematic construct in which individual facts needed to fit into a larger framework in order to make sense. He used the image of a house to explain this: before constructing it brick by brick and piece by piece, it was necessary to have an idea of how the entire building would look. It was this concept of a system that became the linchpin of Humboldt’s later thinking.

There was no avoiding these ideas in Jena – everybody was talking about them – with one British visitor remarking that the small town was the ‘most fashionable seat of the new philosophy’. Goethe admired Kant and had read all his works and Wilhelm was so fascinated that Alexander worried his brother would ‘study himself to death’ over the Critique of Pure Reason. One of Kant’s pupils, who was teaching at Jena University, told Schiller that within the next century Kant would be as famous as Jesus Christ.

What interested those in the Jena circle most was this relationship between the internal and the external world. Ultimately it led to the question: How is knowledge possible? During the Enlightenment the internal and the external world had been regarded as two entirely separate entities, but later English Romantics such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and American Transcendentalists such as Ralph Waldo Emerson would declare that man had once been one with nature – during a long vanished Golden Age. It was this lost unity that they strove to restore, insisting that the only way to do so was through art, poetry and emotions. According to the Romantics, nature could only be understood by turning inwards.

Humboldt was immersed in Kant’s theories and would later keep a bust of the philosopher in his study, calling him a great philosopher. Half a century later, he would still say that the external world only existed in so far as we perceived it ‘within ourselves’. As it was shaped inside the mind, so did it shape our understanding of nature. The external world, ideas and feelings ‘melt into each other’, Humboldt would write.

Goethe was also grappling with these ideas of the Self and nature, of the subjective and the objective, of science and imagination. He had developed, for example, a colour theory in which he discussed how colour was perceived – a concept in which the role of the eye had become central because it brought the outer world into the inner. Goethe insisted that objective truth could only be attained by combining subjective experiences (through the perception of the eye, for example) with the observer’s power of reasoning. ‘The senses do not deceive,’ Goethe declared, ‘it is judgement that deceives.’

This growing emphasis on subjectivity began radically to change Humboldt’s thinking. It was the time in Jena that moved him from purely empirical research towards his own interpretation of nature – a concept that brought together exact scientific data with an emotional response to what he was seeing. Humboldt had long believed in the importance of close observation and of rigorous measurements – firmly embracing Enlightenment methods – but now he also began to appreciate individual perception and subjectivity. Only a few years previously, he had admitted that ‘vivid phantasy confuses me’, but now he came to believe that imagination was as necessary as rational thought in order to understand the natural world. ‘Nature must be experienced through feeling,’ Humboldt wrote to Goethe, insisting that those who wanted to describe the world by simply classifying plants, animals and rocks ‘will never get close to it’.

It was also around this time that both read Erasmus Darwin’s popular poem Loves of the Plants. The grandfather of Charles Darwin, Erasmus was a physician, inventor and scientist who in his poem had turned the Linnaean sexual classification system of plants into verses crowded with lovesick violets, jealous cowslips and blushing roses. Populated by horned snails, fluttering leaves, silver moonlight and lovemaking on ‘moss-embroider’d beds’, Loves of the Plants had become the most talked-about poem in England.

Four decades later, Humboldt would write to Charles Darwin how much he had admired his grandfather for proving that a mutual admiration for nature and imagination was ‘powerful and productive’. Goethe was not quite as impressed. He liked the idea of the poem but found its execution too pedantic and rambling, commenting to Schiller that the verses lacked any trace of ‘poetic feeling’.

Goethe believed in the marriage of art and science, and his reawakened fascination with science did not – as Schiller had feared – remove him from his art. For too long poetry and science had been regarded as the ‘greatest antagonists’, Goethe said, but now he began to infuse his literary work with science. In Faust, Goethe’s most famous play, the drama’s main protagonist, the restless scholar Heinrich Faust, makes a pact with the devil, Mephistopheles, in exchange for infinite knowledge. Published in two separate parts as Faust I and Faust II in 1808 and 1832, Goethe wrote Faust in bursts of activity that often coincided with Humboldt’s visits. Faust, like Humboldt, was driven by a relentless striving for knowledge, by a ‘feverish unrest’, as he declares in the play’s first scene. At the time when he was working on Faust, Goethe said about Humboldt: ‘I’ve never known anyone who combined such a deliberately channelled activity with such plurality of the mind’ – words that might have described Faust. Both Faust and Humboldt believed that ferocious activity and enquiry brought understanding – and both found strength in the natural world and believed in the unity of nature. Like Humboldt, Faust was trying to discover ‘all Nature’s hidden powers’. When Faust declares his ambition in the first scene, ‘That I may detect the inmost force / Which binds the world, and guides its course’, it could have been Humboldt speaking. That something of Humboldt was in Goethe’s Faust – or something of Faust in Humboldt – was obvious to many; so much so that people commented on the resemblance when the play was finally published in 1808.²

There were other examples of Goethe’s fusion of art and science. For his poem ‘Metamorphosis of Plants’, he translated his earlier essay about the urform of plants into poetry. And for Elective Affinities, a novel about marriage and love, he chose a contemporary scientific term as a title that described the tendency of certain chemical elements to combine. Because of this inherent ‘affinity’ of the chemicals actively to bond with another, this was also an important theory within the circle of scientists who discussed the vital force of matter. The French scientist Pierre- Simon Laplace, for example, whom Humboldt greatly admired, explained that ‘all chemical combinations are the result of attractive forces’. Laplace saw this as nothing less than the key to the universe. Goethe used the properties of these chemical bonds to evoke relationships and changing passions between the four protagonists in the novel. This was chemistry translated into literature. Nature, science and imagination were moving ever closer.

Or as Faust says, knowledge could not be wrenched from nature by observation, instrument or experiment alone:

We snatch in vain at Nature’s veil,

She is mysterious in broad daylight,

No screws or levers can compel her to reveal

The secrets she has hidden from our sight.

Goethe’s descriptions of nature in his plays, novels and poems were as truthful, Humboldt believed, as the discoveries of the best scientists. He would never forget that Goethe encouraged him to combine nature and art, facts and imagination. And it was this new emphasis on subjectivity that allowed Humboldt to link the previous mechanistic view of nature as promulgated by scientists such as Leibnitz, Descartes or Newton with the poetry of the Romantics. Humboldt would thus become the link that connected Newton’s Opticks, which explained that rainbows were created by light refracting through raindrops, to poets such as John Keats, who declared that Newton ‘had destroyed all the Poetry of the rainbow, by reducing it to a prism’.

The time in Jena, Humboldt later recalled, ‘affected me powerfully’. Being with Goethe, Humboldt said, equipped him with ‘new organs’ through which to see and understand the natural world. And it was with those new organs that Humboldt would see South America.

¹ It was the Italian physicist Alessandro Volta who proved Humboldt and Galvani wrong, showing that animal nerves were not charged with electricity. The convulsions that Humboldt had produced in animals were in fact triggered by the contact of the metals – an idea that led Volta to invent the first battery in 1800.

² Others also made connections between Humboldt and Mephistopheles. Goethe’s niece said that ‘Humboldt seemed to her as Mephistopheles did to Gretchen’ – not the nicest compliment since Gretchen (Faust’s lover) realizes at the end of the play that Mephistopheles is the devil and turns to God and away from Faust.