Goethe had equipped him with ‘new senses’, and it was with those new senses that Alexander von Humboldt had explored South America. And though he had travelled with forty-two scientific instruments, he wasn’t just interested in empirical data. Like his old Jena friends, he believed that feelings and imagination were essential tools for making sense of the external world. With his books he wanted to feed ‘the desire for knowledge and the powers of imagination at the same time’.
