Humboldt in the trenches of science and how to read natural poetry – marginalian
He was born in the Heyday of the rejection of the human animal, in a country where nature was observed by the scientific evber, September 14, 1769 – May 6, 1859. Isolation, “gives us a modern understanding of nature as a system. Napoleon hated him for his illegal views and decoration. Goethe appealed to him as his greatest ally, his very brief company and his conversations that felt as if they “lasted several years.” Thoreau thought of his eyes “Nature's telescopes & microscopes.” Whitman expressed himself as “kosmos” after the title of Huboldt's book in the Epoch-of-making. Darwin, looking back on his life, readily admitted that without the encouraging encouragement of the Memoir-travelogue, all certain passages of which the heart can repeat itself, he never rode the – They doit has never been written On the origin of speciesnever had His experience been greater when climbing the andes in Humboldt's footsteps.
Humboldt understood that a different way of seeing requires a different way of expressing what is visible. Because nature exists, he insisted, to write about it he wants to include evidence that is “appropriate to testify to the greatness and greatness of creation” – in other words, almost poetry. (A century and a half after her, Rachel Carson would mock our imagination of nature and literature that blocked her conviction that because nature is poetic, “No one can truly write [it] And leave the poems. “) Such merit comes only from a view that sees the interdependence of sovereignty.
Humboldt writes:
When he looks at the study of what happens in the body, not just in its ideas in the study of life, but in its general influence in its complete development of humanity, we find a natural result that is linked together, and acts in dependence on each other; And it is the perception of these relational objects that elevates our views and inspires our happiness.
The “shining vision” of such dependence, Huboldt sees, was always present in the so-called “primitive societies” as a kind of shadow form, until science emerged from its basic illumination through its process of “long and difficult viewing.” His closeness, two centuries before the summer Richard Feynman made a good case wearing his flower, that deepens our sense of its majesty and our bright participation in this problem and result. ”
And yet for all the “joy of discovering things,” in Feynman's beautiful phrase, Huboldt finds the beating heart of this day's adventure not in the mind but in our animal sensorium. He was able to see nature as a system because – unlike the people he lived with, unlike most of us – we can hold true, that we can hold true, so that we can hold emotions, that they feel, that the animals together feel inside. In the Cartesian period of “I think, therefore I am,” Huboldt seems to be saying: “I hear, therefore I understand.”
Epochs before that process of 'far and bad views' we call science that finds the state of the mode of further discovery – the turbination of further discovery – the turbination of transcending the mind, turbolds explains well in this probar poem The cosmos:
When we think about the different levels of pleasure presented to us in the natural thinking, we find that the first place should be given to the feeling, which is completely independent of the intimate woman presented in the region around us. In the same plain bounded only by the high distuton only, where the heather is low, the surveyor, or the grass, in the ground is soil; on the seashore, where the waves, bursting slowly on the sea, leave a track, green with seaweed; Every now and then, the mind penetrates with the same sense of Greateur and the great universe of nature, revealing to the soul, by mysterious inspiration, the existence of the laws that govern the forces of the universe. Mere in the midst of nature, just in contact with the free spirit, use the sweet but strengthening influence of the wounded spirit, calm the storm of love, and soften the storm of love, and soften the heart when it is stirred in its upper depths. Always there, in all regions of the world, in all stages of understanding, the same sources of entertainment are like veouchsaf. Sincere and strong thoughts awakened by communion with nature from the emergence of a creature of order and harmony with the limit of heaven, whether we look up to the source of heaven, or we want to trace the burning atmosphere in the great world of the sea.
