Magnificent Rebels: The First Romantics and the Invention of the Self

by Andrea Wulf

The influence and inspiration worked both ways. As Alexander later recalled, the time in Jena ‘affected me powerfully’. Goethe changed the way he understood the natural world, moving him from purely empirical research towards an interpretation of nature that combined scientific data with emotional responses. ‘Nature must be experienced through feeling,’ he wrote later to Goethe, insisting that those who tried to describe the world by simply classifying plants, animals and rocks would never come close. Together with a growing emphasis on the subjectivity of the Ich-philosophy, Alexander von Humboldt’s perspective shifted, and almost fifty years later he would write in his international bestseller Cosmos that ‘the external world only exists for us so far as we receive it within ourselves’. Nature, ideas and feelings ‘melt into each other’.