Cosmos. The eye, Humboldt wrote, was the organ of ‘Weltanschauung’, the organ through which we view the world but also through which we interpret, understand and define it. At a time when imagination had been firmly excluded from the sciences, Humboldt insisted that nature couldn’t be understood in any other way. One look at the heavens, Humboldt said, was all it took: the brilliant stars ‘delight the senses and inspire the mind’, yet at the same
