Von Humboldt Quotes

There are three stages of scientific discovery: first people deny it is true; then they deny it is important; finally they credit the wrong person.

History, I believe, furnishes no example of a priest-ridden people maintaining a free civil government. This marks the lowest grade of ignorance of which their civil as well as religious leaders will always avail themselves for their own purposes. {Letter to celebrated scientist Alexander von Humboldt, 6 December, 1813}

Die gefährlichste Weltanschauung ist die Weltanschauung derer, die die Welt nie angeschaut haben. (The most dangerous worldview is the worldview of those who have not viewed the world)

The most dangerous worldviews are the worldviews of those who have never viewed the world.

I am more and more convinced that our happiness or unhappiness depends far more on the way we meet the events of life, than on the nature of those events themselves.

The most dangerous worldview is the worldview of those have not viewed the world.

Knowledge, Humboldt believed, had to be shared, exchanged and made available to everybody.

How a person masters his fate is more important than what his fate is.

What speaks to the soul, escapes our measurements.

I saw with regret, (and all scientific men have shared this feeling) that whilst the number of accurate instruments was daily increasing, we were still ignorant

With most animals, as with man, the alertness of the senses diminishes after years of work, after domestic habits and progress of culture.

While we maintain the unity of the human species, we at the same time repel the depressing assumption of superior and inferior races of men. There are nations more susceptible of cultivation, more highly civilized, more ennobled by mental cultivation than others—but none in themselves nobler than others.

Our imagination is struck only by what is great; but the lover of natural philosophy should reflect equally on little things.

Humboldt ‘read’ plants as others did books – and to him they revealed a global force behind nature, the movements of civilizations as well as of landmass. No one had ever approached botany in this way.

This view of a living nature where man is nothing is both odd and sad. Here, in a fertile land, in an eternal greenness, you search in vain for traces of man; you feel you are carried into a different world from the one you were born into.

The effects of the human species’ intervention were already ‘incalculable’, Humboldt insisted, and could become catastrophic if they continued to disturb the world so ‘brutally’. Humboldt would see again and again how humankind unsettled the balance of nature.

The study of maps and the perusal of travel books aroused in me a secret fascination that was at times almost irresistible.

Nature is the domain of liberty,’ Humboldt said, because nature’s balance was created by diversity which might in turn be taken as a blueprint for political and moral truth. Everything, from the most unassuming moss or insect to elephants or towering oak trees, had its role, and together they made the whole. Humankind was just one small part. Nature itself was a republic of freedom.

Results are nothing; the energies which produce them and which again spring from them are everything.

All growth toward perfection is but a returning to original existence.

As soon as one stops searching for knowledge, or if one imagines that it need not be creatively sought in the depths of the human spirit but can be assembled extensively by collecting and classifying facts, everything is irrevocably and forever lost.

Without a diversity of opinion, the discovery of truth is impossible,’ he

Nature itself was a republic of freedom.

If we reason that we want happiness for others, not for ourselves, then we ought justly to be suspected of failing to recognize human nature for what it is and of wishing to turn men into machines.

Kühner, als das Unbekannte zu erforschen, kann es sein, das Bekannte zu bezweifeln.

He [Alexander von Humboldt] was to science what Shakespeare was to the drama.

In considering the study of physical phenomena, not merely in its bearings on the material wants of life, but in its general influence on the intellectual advancement of mankind, we find its noblest and most important result to be a knowledge of the chain of connection, by which all natural forces are linked together, and made mutually dependent upon each other; and it is the perception of these relations that exalts our views and ennobles our enjoyments.

What does it mean to be truly educated? I think I can do no better about answering the question of what it means to be truly educated than to go back to some of the classic views on the subject. For example the views expressed by the founder of the modern higher education system, Wilhelm von Humboldt, leading humanist, a figure of the enlightenment who wrote extensively on education and human development and argued, I think, kind of very plausibly, that the core principle and requirement of a fulfilled human being is the ability to inquire and create constructively independently without external controls. To move to a modern counterpart, a leading physicist who talked right here [at MIT], used to tell his classes it's not important what we cover in the class, it's important what you discover. To be truly educated from this point of view means to be in a position to inquire and to create on the basis of the resources available to you which you've come to appreciate and comprehend. To know where to look, to know how to formulate serious questions, to question a standard doctrine if that's appropriate, to find your own way, to shape the questions that are worth pursuing, and to develop the path to pursue them. That means knowing, understanding many things but also, much more important than what you have stored in your mind, to know where to look, how to look, how to question, how to challenge, how to proceed independently, to deal with the challenges that the world presents to you and that you develop in the course of your self education and inquiry and investigations, in cooperation and solidarity with others. That's what an educational system should cultivate from kindergarten to graduate school, and in the best cases sometimes does, and that leads to people who are, at least by my standards, well educated.

The real discoverer of South America was [Alexander von] Humboldt, since his work was more useful for our people than the work of all conquerors.

The expression of vanity and self-love becomes less offensive, when it retains something of simplicity and frankness.

For even if we know very little that is certain about spirit or soul, the true nature of the body, of materiality, is totally unknown and incomprehensible to us.

Whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness...we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is.

…man never regards what he possesses as so much his own, as what he does; and the labourer who tends a garden is perhaps in a truer sense its owner, than the listless voluptuary who enjoys its fruits…In view of this consideration, it seems as if all peasants and craftsman might be elevated into artists; that is, men who love their labour for its own sake, improve it by their own plastic genius and inventive skill, and thereby cultivate their intellect, ennoble their character, and exalt and refine their pleasures. And so humanity would be ennobled by the very things which now, though beautiful in themselves, so often serve to degrade it…But, still, freedom is undoubtedly the indispensable condition, without which even the pursuits most congenial to individual human nature, can never succeed in producing such salutary influences. Whatever does not spring from a man’s free choice, or is only the result of instruction and guidance, does not enter into his very being, but remains alien to his true nature; he does not perform it with truly human energies, but merely with mechanical exactness… …we may admire what he does, but we despise what he is.

Happiness is so nonsynonymous with joy or pleasure that it is not infrequently sought and felt in grief and deprivation.

Die gefährlichste aller Weltanschauungen ist die Weltanschauung der Leute, welche die Welt nicht angeschaut haben.

Humboldt wrote that nature had to be experienced through feelings

What we glean from travellers' vivid descriptions has a special charm; whatever is far off and suggestive excites our imagination; such pleasures tempt us far more than anything we may daily experience in the narrow circle of sedentary life.

As a rule, theologians know nothing of this world, and far less of the next; but they have the power of stating the most absurd propositions with faces solemn as stupidity touched by fear. It is a part of their business to malign and vilify the Voltaires, Humes, Paines, Humboldts, Tyndalls, Haeckels, Darwins, Spencers, and Drapers, and to bow with uncovered heads before the murderers, adulterers, and persecutors of the world. They are, for the most part, engaged in poisoning the minds of the young, prejudicing children against science, teaching the astronomy and geology of the bible, and inducing all to desert the sublime standard of reason.

In the late eighteenth century scientists had begun to suggest that the earth must be older than the Bible, but they couldn’t agree on how the earth had formed.

After an early breakfast of black coffee – ‘concentrated sunshine’, as Humboldt called it – he worked all day and in the evening went on his usual tour of salons until 2 a.m. He

Nature every where speaks to man in a voice,’ Humboldt said, that is ‘familiar to his soul’.

Every scientist is a descendant of Humboldt. We are all his family.

Columbus gave Europe a New World; [Alexander von] Humboldt made it known in its physical, material, intellectual, and moral aspects.

We can never know how wide a circle of disturbance we produce in the harmonies of nature when we throw the smallest pebble in the ocean of organic life,’ Marsh wrote.

[Alexander von Humboldt was the] greatest scientific traveller who ever lived.

I consider him [Alexander von Humboldt] the most important scientist whom I have met.

If the people of Europe had known as much of astronomy and geology when the bible was introduced among them, as they do now, there never could have been one believer in the doctrine of inspiration. If the writers of the various parts of the bible had known as much about the sciences as is now known by every intelligent man, the book never could have been written. It was produced by ignorance, and has been believed and defended by its author. It has lost power in the proportion that man has gained knowledge. A few years ago, this book was appealed to in the settlement of all scientific questions; but now, even the clergy confess that in such matters, it has ceased to speak with the voice of authority. For the establishment of facts, the word of man is now considered far better than the word of God. In the world of science, Jehovah was superseded by Copernicus, Galileo, and Kepler. All that God told Moses, admitting the entire account to be true, is dust and ashes compared to the discoveries of Descartes, Laplace, and Humboldt. In matters of fact, the bible has ceased to be regarded as a standard. Science has succeeded in breaking the chains of theology. A few years ago, Science endeavored to show that it was not inconsistent with the bible. The tables have been turned, and now, Religion is endeavoring to prove that the bible is not inconsistent with Science. The standard has been changed.

But when on shore, & wandering in the sublime forests, surrounded by views more gorgeous than even Claude ever imagined, I enjoy a delight which none but those who have experienced it can understand - If it is to be done, it must be by studying Humboldt.

Humboldt wrote about the destruction of forests and of humankind’s long-term changes to the environment. When he listed the three ways in which the human species was affecting the climate, he named deforestation, ruthless irrigation and, perhaps most prophetically, the ‘great masses of steam and gas’ produced in the industrial centres. No one but Humboldt had looked at the relationship between humankind and nature like this before.

It is far more difficult to observe correctly than most men imagine; to behold is not necessarily to observe, and the power of comparing and combining is only to be obtained by education. It is much to be regretted that habits of exact observation are not cultivated in our schools; to this deficiency may be traced much of the fallacious reasoning, the false philosophy which prevails.

School is different. Pupils are usually not encouraged to follow their own learning paths, question and discuss everything the teacher is teaching and move on to another topic if something does not promise to generate interesting insight. The teacher is there for the pupils to learn. But, as Wilhelm von Humboldt, founder of the Humboldt University of Berlin and brother to the great explorer Alexander von Humboldt, put it, the professor is not there for the student and the student not for the professor. Both are only there for the truth. And truth is always a public matter.

The government is best which makes itself unnecessary.

Faith can be interested in results only, for a truth once recognized as such puts an end to the believer's thinking.

Human nature must be something which always remains one and the same, but which may be carried out in manifold ways.

Alle Widerstände lassen sich durch Energie besiegen.

We aren’t born with a ready-made conscience. As we pass through life, we hurt people and people hurt us, we act compassionately and others show compassion to us. If we pay attention, our moral sensitivity sharpens, and these experiences become a source of valuable ethical knowledge about what is good, what is right and who I really am. Humanism thus sees life as a gradual process of inner change, leading from ignorance to enlightenment by means of experiences. The highest aim of humanist life is to fully develop your knowledge through a large variety of intellectual, emotional and physical experiences. In the early nineteenth century, Wilhelm von Humboldt – one of the chief architects of the modern education system – said that the aim of existence is ‘a distillation of the widest possible experience of life into wisdom’. He also wrote that ‘there is only one summit in life – to have taken the measure in feeling of everything human’. This could well be the humanist motto.

State philosophy reposes on a double identity: of the thinking subject, and of the concepts it creates and to which it lends its own presumed attributes of sameness and constancy. The subjects, its concepts, and also the objects in the world to which the concepts are applied have a shared, internal essence: the self-resemblance at the basis of identity. Representational thought is analogical; its concern is to establish a correspondence between these symmetrically structured domains. The faculty of judgment is the policeman of analogy, assuring that each of these terms is honestly itself, and that the proper correspondences obtain. In thought its end is truth, in action justice. The weapons it wields in their pursuit are limitive distribution (the determination of the exclusive set of properties possessed by each term in contradistinction to the others: logos, law) and hierarchical ranking (the measurement of the degree of perfection of a term’s self-resemblance in relation to a supreme standard, man, god, or gold: value, morality). The modus operandi is negation: x = x = not y. Identity, resemblance, truth, justice, and negation. The rational foundation for order. The established order, of course: philosophers have traditionally been employees of the State. The collusion between philosophy and the State was most explicitly enacted in the first decade of the nineteenth century with the foundation of the University of Berlin, which was to become the model of higher learning throughout Europe and in the United States. The goal laid out for it by Wilhelm von Humboldt (based on proposals by Fichte and Schleiermacher) was the ‘spiritual and moral training of the nation,’ to be achieved by ‘deriving everything from an original principle’ (truth), by ‘relating everything to an ideal’ (justice), and by ‘unifying this principle and this ideal to a single Idea’ (the State). The end product would be ‘a fully legitimated subject of knowledge and society’ – each mind an analogously organized mini-State morally unified in the supermind of the State. More insidious than the well-known practical cooperation between university and government (the burgeoning military funding of research) is its philosophical role in the propagation of the form of representational thinking itself, that ‘properly spiritual absolute State’ endlessly reproduced and disseminated at every level of the social fabric.

It is an absolutely vain endeavor to attempt to reconstruct or even comprehend the nature of a human being by simply knowing the forces which have acted upon him. However deeply we should like to penetrate, however close we seem to be drawing to truth, one unknown quantity eludes us: man's primordial energy, his original self, that personality which was given him with the gift of life itself. On it rests man's true freedom; it alone determines his real character.

I regard marriage as a sin and propagation of children as a crime. It is my conviction also that he is a fool, and still more a sinner, who takes upon himself the yoke of marriage - a fool, because he thereby throws away his freedom, without gaining a corresponding recompense; a sinner, because he gives life to children, without being able to give them the certainty of happiness. I despise humanity in all its strata; I foresee that our posterity will be far more unhappy than we are; and should not I be a sinner, if, in spite of this insight, I should take care to leave a posterity of unhappy beings behind me? The whole of life is the greatest insanity. And if for eighty years one strives and inquiries, still one is obliged finally to confess that he has striven for nothing and has found nothing. Did we at least know why we are in this world! But to the thinker, everything is and remains a riddle; and the greatest good luck is that of being born a flathead.

During the first half of the present century we had an Alexander von Humboldt, who was able to scan the scientific knowledge of his time in its details, and to bring it within one vast generalization. At the present juncture, it is obviously very doubtful whether this task could be accomplished in a similar way, even by a mind with gifts so peculiarly suited for the purpose as Humboldt's was, and if all his time and work were devoted to the purpose.

Humboldt was the ‘greatest of the priesthood of nature’, Marsh said, because he had understood the world as an interplay between man and nature – a connection that would underpin Marsh’s own work because he was collecting material for a book that would explain how humankind was destroying the environment.

In the early nineteenth century Wilhelm von Humboldt – one of the chief architects of the modern education system – said that the aim of existence is ‘a distillation of the widest possible experience of life into wisdom’. He also wrote that ‘there is only one summit in life – to have taken the measure in feeling of everything human’.

Unlike Christopher Columbus or Isaac Newton, Humboldt did not discover a continent or a new law of physics. Humboldt was not know for a single fact or a discovery but for his worldview. His vision of nature has passed into our consciousness as if by osmosis. It is almost as though his ideas have become so manisfest that the man behind them has disappeared.

Basically, it is always the connections with people that give life its value.

Gelehrte dirigieren ist nicht viel besser als eine Komödiantengruppe unter sich zu haben.

The price of apparent happiness and enjoyment is the neglect of the spontaneous active energies of the acting members.

scientific

Nature must be experienced through feeling,’ Humboldt

[Alexander von] Humboldt showers us with true treasures.

If something possesses no capacity for activity whatever, it is nothing; it may be wholly penetrated, but it cannot be touched. Therefore passivity and reaction are everywhere equal.

Die gefährlichste Weltanschauung ist die Weltanschauung derer, die die Welt nie angeschaut haben. "The most dangerous worldview is the worldview of those who have not viewed the world.

Language is deeply entwined in the intellectual development of humanity itself, it accompanies the latter upon every step of its localized progression or regression; moreover, the pertinent cultural level in each case is recognizable in it. ... Language is, as it were, the external manifestation of the minds of peoples. Their language is their soul, and their soul is their language. It is impossible to conceive them ever sufficiently identical... . The creation of language is an innate necessity of humanity. It is not a mere external vehicle, designed to sustain social intercourse, but an indispensable factor for the development of human intellectual powers, culminating in the formulation of philosophical doctrine.

It is easier to find courage for the daring act of a moment, and it requires less inner strength, than does the long patience of enduring physical suffering, deeply driven by a spiritual interest to move forward, disregarding the certainty of encountering again, but with weakened faculties, the same deprivations on the return trip.

Im Gegensatz zu Christoph Kolumbus und Isaac Newton entdeckte Humboldt keinen Kontinent und kein neues physikalisches Gesetz. Humboldts Ruhm beruhte nicht auf einer bestimmten Tat oder Erfindung, sondern auf seiner Sicht der Welt.

Alexander von Humboldt, yet another friend, may have had Agassiz at least partly in mind when he observed that there are three stages in scientific discovery: first, people deny that it is true; then they deny that it is important; finally they credit the wrong person. At

Nature is a living whole,' he later said, not a 'dead aggregate'. One single life had been poured over stones, plants, animals and humankind. It was this 'universal profusion with which life is everywhere distributed' that most impressed Humboldt. Even the atmosphere carried the kernels of future life - pollen, insect eggs and seeds. Life was everywhere and those 'organic powers are incessantly at work', he wrote. Humboldt was not so much interested in finding new isolated facts but in connecting them. Individual phenomena were only important 'in their relation to the whole', he explained.

The best and noblest parts of man depend precious little on culture, education, and whatever else it is called. One can never have enough respect for true humanity as it is visible in the persons of the totally uneducated classes, and never enough humility if one sometimes believes one is superior to them.

He wanted to excite a ‘love of nature’. At a time when other scientists were searching for universal laws, Humboldt wrote that nature had to be experienced through feelings.

Humboldt later put it succinctly: ‘The wooded region acts in a threefold manner in diminishing the temperature; by cooling shade, by evaporation, and by radiation.

it didn’t matter how far one journeyed ‘but how much alive you are’.

El 14 de octubre, las tropas de Napoleón aniquilaron al ejército prusiano en dos batallas, en Jena y Auerstädt.

All situations in which the interrelationships between extremes are involved are the most interesting and instructive.

To judge a man means nothing other than to ask: What content does he give to the form of humanity? What concept should we have of humanity if he were its only representative?

We have not the remotest realistic inkling of a consciousness which is not self-consciousness.

When Humboldt later instigated a German translation of Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin wrote to a friend, ‘I must with unpardonable vanity boast to you.

Joy mingled with sadness, even with grief, is the deepest human joy. It winds itself about the soul with indescribable sweetness, with a dim but unerring sense for what will some day be born of it.

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.

Then, in the late summer of 1790, Humboldt began to study finance and economics at the academy of trade in Hamburg. He hated it for it was all numbers and account books. In his spare time, Humboldt delved into scientific treatises and travel book, he learned Danish and Swedish - anything was better than his business studies. Whenever he could, he walked down to the River Elbe in Hamburg where he watched the large merchant vessels that brought tobacco, rice and indigo from the United States. The 'sight of the ships in the harbour', he told a friend, was what held him together - a symbol of his hopes and dreams. He couldn't wait to be finally the 'master of his own luck'.

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.

Wilhelm Von Humboldt that presaged Chomsky: language “makes infinite use of finite media.” We know the difference between the forgettable Dog bites man and the newsworthy Man bites dog because of the order in which dog, man, and bites are combined. That is, we use a code to translate between orders of words and combinations of thoughts. That code, or set of rules, is called a generative grammar; as I have mentioned, it should not be confused with the pedagogical and stylistic grammars we encountered in school.

In Views of Nature Humboldt conjured up the quiet solitude of Andean mountaintops and the fertility of the rainforest, as well as the magic of a meteor shower and the gruesome spectacle of catching the electric eels in the Llanos. He wrote of the ‘glowing womb of the earth’ and ‘bejewelled’ riverbanks. Here a desert became a ‘sea of sands’, leaves unfolded ‘to greet the rising sun’, and apes filled the jungle with ‘melancholy howlings’. In the mists at the rapids of the Orinoco, rainbows danced in a game of hide-and-seek – ‘optical magic’, as he called it. Humboldt created poetic vignettes when he wrote of strange insects that ‘poured their red phosphoric light on the herb-covered ground, which glowed with living fire as if the starry canopy of heaven had sunk upon the turf’.

Alles, womit sich der Mensch beschäftigt, wenn es gleich nur bestimmt ist, physische Bedürfnisse mittelbar oder unmittelbar zu befriedigen oder überhaupt äußere Zwecke zu erreichen, ist auf das genaueste mit innren Empfindungen verknüpft. Manchmal ist auch neben dem äußeren Endzweck noch ein innerer, und manchmal ist sogar dieser der eigentlich beabsichtete, jener nur notwendig oder zufällig damit verbunden. Je mehr Einheit der Mensch besitzt, desto freier entspringt das äußere Geschäft, das er wählt, aus seinem innren Sein, und desto häufiger und fester knüpft sich dieses an jenes da an, wo dasselbe nicht frei gewählt wurde. Daher ist der interessante Mensch in allen Lagen und allen Geschäften interessant; daher blüht er zu einer entzückenden Schönheit auf in einer Lebensweise, die mit seinem Charakter übereinstimmt.

With this Humboldt brought together the external physical world with the internal world of the mind. Humboldt’s Cosmos was about the relationship between humankind and nature, and Thoreau placed himself firmly into this cosmos. At Walden Pond, he wrote, ‘I have a little world all to myself’ – his own sun, stars and moon. ‘Why should I feel lonely?’ he asked. ‘Is not our planet in the Milky Way?’ He was no more lonely than a flower or bumblebee in a meadow because like them he was part of nature. ‘Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?’ he asked in Walden.

In Views of Nature Humboldt showed how nature could have an influence on people’s imagination. Nature, he wrote, was in a mysterious communication with our ‘inner feelings’. A clear blue sky, for example, triggers different emotions than a heavy blanket of dark clouds. Tropical scenery, densely filled with banana and palm trees, has a different effect than an open forest of white-stemmed slender birches. What we might take for granted today – that there is a correlation between the external world and our mood – was a revelation to Humboldt’s readers. Poets had engaged with such ideas but never a scientist.

Humboldt was the first to relate colonialism to the devastation of the environment. Again and again, his thoughts returned to nature as a complex web of life but also to man’s place within it. At the Rio Apure, he had seen the devastation caused by the Spanish who had tried to control the annual flooding by building a dam. To make matters worse, they had also felled the trees that had held the riverbanks together like ‘a very tight wall’ with the result that the raging river carried more land away each year. On the high plateau of Mexico City, Humboldt had observed how a lake that fed the local irrigation system had shrunk into a shallow puddle, leaving the valleys beneath barren. Everywhere in the world, Humboldt said, water engineers were guilty of such short-sighted follies. He debated nature, ecological issues, imperial power and politics in relation to each other. He criticized unjust land distribution, monocultures, violence against tribal groups and indigenous work conditions – all powerfully relevant issues today. As a former mining inspector, Humboldt had a unique insight into the environmental and economic consequences of the exploitation of nature’s riches. He questioned Mexico’s dependence on cash crops and mining, for example, because it bound the country to fluctuating international market prices. ‘The only capital,’ he said, that ‘increases with time, consists in the produce of agriculture’. All problems in the colonies, he was certain, were the result of the ‘imprudent activities of the Europeans’.

México es el país de la desigualdad. Acaso en ninguna parte la hay más espantosa en la distribución de fortunas, civilización, cultivo de la tierra y población… La capital y otras muchas ciudades tienen establecimientos científicos que se pueden comparar con los de Europa. La arquitectura de los edificios públicos y privados, la finura del ajuar de las mujeres, el aire de la sociedad; todo anuncia un extremo de esmero, que se contrapone extraordinariamente a la desnudez, ignorancia y rusticidad del populacho. Esta inmensa desigualdad de fortunas no sólo se observa en la casta de los blancos (europeos o criollos), sino que igualmente se manifiesta entre los indígenas.

Humboldt's early biographer, F.A. Schwarzenberg, subtitled his life of Humboldt What May Be Accomplished in a Lifetime. He summarised the areas of his subject's extraordinary curiosity as follows: '1) The knowledge of the Earth and its inhabitants. 2) The discovery of the higher laws of nature, which govern the universe, men, animals, plants, minerals. 3) The discovery of new forms of life. 4) The discovery of territories hitherto but imperfectly known, and their various productions. 5) The acquaintance with new species of the human race--- their manners, their language and the historical traces of their culture.' What may be accomplished in a lifetime---and seldom or never is.

French scientists feared that Paris was going to lose its status as a centre for innovative scientific thinking. At the Académie des Sciences, Humboldt said, the savants did little and what little they did often ended in quarrels. Even worse, the scholars had formed a secret committee to sanitize the library there – removing books that propounded liberal ideas like those written by Enlightenment thinkers such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire. When the childless Louis XVIII died in September 1824 his brother Charles X, the leader of the ultra-royalists, became king. All those who believed in liberty and in the values of the revolution knew that the intellectual climate could only become more repressive.

What does it mean to be truly educated? I think I can do no better about answering the question of what it means to be truly educated than to go back to some of the classic views on the subject. For example the views expressed by the founder of the modern higher education system, Wilhelm von Humboldt, leading humanist, a figure of the enlightenment who wrote extensively on education and human development and argued, I think, kind of very plausibly, that the core principle and requirement of a fulfilled human being is the ability to inquire and create constructively independently without external controls. To move to a modern counterpart, a leading physicist who talked right here [at MIT], used to tell his classes it's not important what we cover in the class, it's important what you discover. To be truly educated from this point of view means to be in a position to inquire and to create on the basis of the resources available to you which you've come to appreciate and comprehend. To know where to look, to know how to formulate serious questions, to question a standard doctrine if that's appropriate, to find your own way, to shape the questions that are worth pursuing, and to develop the path to pursue them. That means knowing, understanding many things but also, much more important than what you have stored in your mind, to know where to look, how to look, how to question, how to challenge, how to proceed independently, to deal with the challenges that the world presents to you and that you develop in the course of your self education and inquiry and investigations, in cooperation and solidarity with others. That's what an educational system should cultivate from kindergarten to graduate school, and in the best cases sometimes does, and that leads to people who are, at least by my standards, well educated.” ― Noam Chomsky

The sum of the knowable, that soil which the human spirit must till, lies between all the languages and independent of them, at their center. But man cannot approach this purely objective realm other than through his own modes of cognition and feeling, in other words: subjectively. Just where study and research touch the highest and deepest point, just there does the mechanical, logical use of reason - whatever in us can most easily be separated from our uniqueness as individual human beings - find itself at the end of its rope. From here on we need a process of inner perception and creation. And all that we can plainly know about this is its result, namely, that objective truth always rises from the entire energy of subjective individuality.