The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt's New World

by Andrea Wulf

the real purpose of the voyage, he said, was to discover how ‘all forces of nature are interlaced and interwoven’ – how organic and inorganic nature interacted. Man needs to strive for ‘the good and the great’, Humboldt wrote in his last letter from Spain, ‘the rest depends on destiny’.

Humboldt was the first to explain the fundamental functions of the forest for the ecosystem and climate: the trees’ ability to store water and to enrich the atmosphere with moisture, their protection of the soil, and their cooling effect.

Nature, Humboldt realized, was a web of life and a global force. He was, a colleague later said, the first to understand that everything was interwoven as with ‘a thousand threads’. This new idea of nature was to change the way people understood the world.

The indigenous languages, Humboldt said, were so sophisticated that there wasn’t a single European book that could not be translated into any one of them.

en todas las lenguas se pueden expresar todas las cosas; incluso aquellas que no son parte de la cultura donde se hablan...

The wealthy creoles, Humboldt was convinced, preferred to be ruled by Spain rather than share power with the mestizos, slaves and indigenous people.

extrañamente esto pasa casi siempre...

Schelling emphasized the vital force that connected nature and man, insisting that there was an organic bond between the Self and nature. ‘I myself am identical with nature,’

Humboldt’s idea of nature as a living organism animated by dynamic forces fell on fertile ground in England. It was the guiding principle and the leading metaphor for the Romantics.

interesante!

Humboldt’s nature was ‘animated by one breath – from pole to pole, one life is poured on rocks, plants, animals, and even into the swelling breast of man’, but that breath came from the earth itself, and was not instigated by any divine agency.

‘monism’ – the idea that there was no division between the organic and the inorganic world.

Monism turned explicitly against the concept of a dualism between mind and matter. This idea of unity replaced God, and with this, monism became the most important ersatz religion at the turn of the twentieth century.