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[rough draft – not for citation]
Alexander von Humboldt and Monism
Nicolaas Rupke, G öttingen
Linking Humboldt and monism
A linkage of "Alexander von Humboldt" and "monism" is by and large absent from the history of science literature of the post-WW II period. Yet, as I hope to show, the connection is of significance. Specifically, I like to argue that Humboldtian monism, in addition to summarizing a scientific trend in what Todd Weir aptly defines as "the monist century," was of considerable political significance, especially in the
German-speaking world. Monism took on different forms in different places
– it had a geography of meaning
– and I am dealing predominantly, although not exclusively, with its German location.
Let me begin by providing some indications that Humboldt and monism were connected in the perception of the monists themselves. When through the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, monism developed into an organised movement and a scientifically defined world view, many of its representatives considered Alexander von Humboldt a founder and inspiration. The monists in part represented an outgrowth of the older tradition of German
Humboldtianism from the period 1848-71, especially with respect to their commitment to the popularization of science in public education. Already early during the second half of the nineteenth century, Humboldt was instrumentalised on behalf of monist institutions, when a variety of "forerunner" organisations sprang up, some of which included the name "Humboldt" or the title "Cosmos" in their banner. A majority of these societies were active in Volksbildung , such as the Society for the Promotion of
Popular Education (founded 1871), the similarly orientated Humboldt Academy in
Berlin (founded 1878) and various other popular educational institutions (Daum 1998,
169). Journals such as Gaea (1865-1909, from 1910 subsumed under
Naturwissenschaftliche Rundschau ), Kosmos (1877-86, from 1887 subsumed under
Humboldt ) and Humboldt (1882-90, from 1891 subsumed under
Naturwissenschaftliche Rundschau ) combined Humboldtian popularization with a

2 monist creed (Seidlitz 1877, 1879; Chun 1882; Daum 1998, 343). So did another journal with the name Kosmos (1904-33).
Monism as a formal movement was established in 1906 in Haeckel's Jena, one of several " Weltanschauung societies" that originated in Germany before WW I
(Daum 1998, 194). In 1908 Wilhelm Breitenbach (1856-1937), a founding member of the Monist League, led a breakaway group and started the Society for a New
Worldview, which in 1911 was renamed the Humboldt League for a Scientific
Worldview, in recognition of the importance of Humboldt and his popularly accessible writings ([Breitenbach] 1908; 1911; Daum 1998, 219; Weber 2000, 70, 134-157).
Others, too, laid claim to Humboldt on behalf of monism. "That such a man was a freethinker and a monist in the best sense of the word, that he flatly rejected every form of belief in miracles, every form of obscurantism
– this needs no special proof"
([Metze
] 1911a, 159; see also Fränkel-München, 1909). "Through his 'Kosmos' concept of a uniform universe, organized according to laws, Humboldt appears as one of the most important and scientifically eminent representatives of monism, of which we hear so much today" (Salinger 1919, 39).
Cosmos the quintessential link
Cosmos provided the quintessential link of Humboldt with monism. If not the
Bible of the monist Weltanschauung , Cosmos was its Old Testament. Humboldt's name became synonymous with the title of his last book, and came to denote the totality of the sciences as well as its popular treatment. More particularly, it referred to the large-scale representation of all physical phenomena and their interrelatedness in trying to establish universal "Gesetzmässigkeiten" (conformities with natural laws).
Humboldt himself did not call his approach "monism," but a "physique du monde."
Humboldt's Kosmos ( appearing in five volumes under the title Kosmos.
Entwurf einer physischen Weltbeschreibung , vol. 1, 1845; vol. 2, 1847; vol. 3, 1850-
51; vol. 4, 1858; and a posthumous vol. 5, 1862) played a leading role in the determination of the place of scientific knowledge in mid-nineteenth century
European society. Humboldt produced Cosmos towards the end of his long life, when he was in his late 70s and 80s, and is best known for this book, although he was internationally celebrated long before the year in which its first volume appeared.
Cosmos constituted the summary of Humboldt's life-long interests. In introducing the reader to the first volume of Cosmos , he wrote: "In the late evening of an active life I

3 offer the German public a work, whose undefined image has floated before my mind for almost half a century" (Humboldt 1845-62, vol. 1, preface; Humboldt 1997, vol. 1,
7).
Cosmos was an immensely popular work, a great success, both to its author and its publishers. It enjoyed five nineteenth-century, authorised German editions, including a German-American one, and a string of translations. International interest in Cosmos was strong, and the commercial potential of translations considerable; renditions into other languages began appearing as soon as volume I was completed. By the time the fourth volume had come out, Cosmos had been translated into no fewer than eleven different languages, and in some languages more than once. Into English, for example, there translations were extant. Just of the original edition, published by J.G. Cotta in Stuttgart and Tübingen, 22.000 copies of volume I, 20.000 of volume II, and 15.000 each of volumes III, IV and V were printed.
In terms of sales, Cosmos made Humboldt the most successful author of his generation. Moreover, a burgeoning Cosmos spin-off industry developed, an example of which was the 5-volume
Briefe über Alexander von Humboldt's Kosmos
(1848-60), a commentary for 'educated laymen', to which the Freiberg geologist Carl Bernhard von Cotta (1808-79) made a major contribution, and which commentary appeared nearly in tandem with the successive Cosmos volumes.
The final product went through a long gestation process. By his own account,
Humboldt began the project in 1819, in France and in French, entitling the manuscript
"Essai sur la Physique du Monde." The concept took shape with a series of salon lectures by Humboldt, delivered during the years 1825-1828, first in Paris, subsequently in Berlin. Then in 1834, Humboldt chose the title "Cosmos" for his planned book, in order to emphasise that he was not writing a conventional physical geography/geology ('physische Erdbeschreibung'), but that his conception embraces both heaven and earth as integral parts of a single whole. Also, this title, in addition to indicating the vast scope of his book, gave expression to Humboldt's aestheticholistic epistemology, as the word "cosmos" in Homeric times had meant "ornament" and "elegance," and later had come to denote the order or harmonious arrangement of the world. Let us read Humboldt's own description of the "cosmos" approach:
It seems to me that a like degree of empiricism attaches to the
Description of the Universe and to Civil History; but in reflecting upon physical

4 phenomena and events, and tracing their causes by the process of reason, we become more and more convinced of the truth of the ancient doctrine, that the forces inherent in matter, and those which govern the moral world, exercise their action under the control of primordial necessity, and in accordance with movements occurring periodically after longer or shorter intervals.
It is this necessity, this occult but permanent connection, this periodical recurrence in the progressive development of forms, phenomena, and events, which constitute nature, obedient to the first impulse imparted to it. Physics, as the term signifies, is limited to the explanation of the phenomena of the material world by the properties of matter. The ultimate object of the experimental sciences is, therefore, to discover laws, and to trace their progressive generalization. All that exceeds this goes beyond the province of the physical description of the universe, and appertains to a range of higher speculative views (Humboldt, 1997, 50).
Humboldt argued that it was a far superior accomplishment to perceive connections than to study isolated facts. To help readers grasp his holistic conception of the universe, he used the metaphor of a " Naturgemälde" ("painting of nature," inadequately translated by Elise C. Otte‚ as "delineation of nature"), adding the element of an aesthetic appreciation of nature to its scientific study. Use of the fine arts metaphor and of a poetic presentation formed the vehicle for bringing the results of specialised scientific research to a large public.
Much of Humboldt's "monistic," holistic physicalism was not original with him, and Cosmos did not so much initiate a trend of methodological naturalism as that it popularized a by then common practice among many fellow scientists and even by some of the generation of his university teachers. Humboldt appealed to Immanuel
Kant (1742-1804), writing in continuation of the above quotation: "Emanuel Kant, one of the few philosophers who have escaped the imputation of impiety, has defined with rare sagacity the limits of physical explanations, in his celebrated essay On the
Theory and Structure of the Heavens , published at Königsberg in 1755" (Humboldt,
1997, 50).
In discussing Humboldt and monism, I shall not develop the question of the precise monistic-philosophical content of Cosmos ; my purpose here is rather to show that the connection of Humboldt's Cosmos with monism and monist organisations

5 was not primarily a matter of the book's scientific epistemology but of the use that could be made of Cosmos in the arena of German politics from 1848 onwards. Two features in particular proved effective, one being the already mentioned popularization of the scientific study of nature, the other its secularization.
The political monism of Cosmos
To assess the role played by Humboldt's last major book we need to look at the reactions to it, how it was read and used. If we want to appreciate Humboldt's
Cosmos for the contribution it made to the dynamics of historical change, it is less important to know what Humboldt actually wrote and what precisely he meant than to explore its impact on the readership or, to put it differently, the appropriation of it by the readership. A crucial question is: "What did Cosmos mean to Humboldt's contemporaries and how did they use it?" One approach to answering this question is a survey of the reviews of the book and of the Humboldt biographies that followed. As
I have argued elsewhere, the way that Cosmos was read differed considerably across Europe (Rupke 1999; 2005), and by no means everybody made a connection with "monism" and its tenets.
In Germany, however, many of Humboldt's reviewers and biographers did. Yet from the start, monism here had a strongly political connotation, even a radical one.
Unity of the world's phenomena, unity of the sciences, merged with the ideal of unity of the German people, a unified Germany. The German Volk , those who shared the language of Goethe and Schiller, constituted a natural entity that should not be broken up like a patchwork quilt into some 25 separate kingdoms and little principalities. This broken-up unnatural existence of the German people was perpetuated by feudalism, absolutism and class privileges in both state and church.
To put an end to this, to establish "Freiheit und Einheit," was the ideal of the
Revolution of 1848. In this context, Cosmos was instrumentalized by the revolutionaries and reformers, and the book's monism meant first and foremost that it was made to contribute to the cause of free and united Germany. Humboldt's great book, the only one of his major publications he originally wrote in the German language, was turned into something of a political manifesto of the revolutionary and reformist groups. One of its main features, in this context, was that Cosmos led the way in the popularization of scientific knowledge. The popular spread of science meant egalitarianism, education of the people, "power to the people." Humboldtian

6 monism equalled liberal democracy. Cosmos ' monism meant not just a particular epistemology of science, I repeat, but above all it stood for science in which the entire
Volk could share.
The political-revolutionary connection becomes evident when we consider the authors of the first distinct group of German Humboldt biographies, published from around the time of the 1848 Revolution until German unification under Bismarck in
1871 (Rupke 2008). These men were by and large "Forty-eighters," and their veneration of Humboldt was nurtured by democratic and nationalistic ideals (Klencke
1851; [Bussenius] 1853; Kletke 1855-56; Zimmermann 1859; Rau 1860; Wittwer
1860; Anon. 1861; Ule 1869; Bruhns 1872; Avé-Lallement 1872; Dove 1872;
Löwenberg 1872a, 1872b).
Humboldt's biographers were guided by two crucial publications, of which the first was Cosmos . Because it was of a popular nature and written in the German language, Humboldt could be portrayed as a teacher of the German Volk , one of the nation's great literary figures, and a force of national unification. Depicting Humboldt with these features meant locating him left of center on the political spectrum. A dramatic attempt at reconfirming this left-wing position took place shortly after
Humboldt's death when a selection of his correspondence with the outspoken liberal democrat Karl August Ludwig Philipp Varnhagen von Ense (1785-1858) appeared in print – the second of the two crucial publications – showing the extent to which
Humboldt had been critical of royalty, and revealing a much greater sympathy for revolutionary causes on his part than the public had previously surmised (Rupke
2005).
The biographers' own left-leaning loyalties took a variety of different forms, some Humboldtians participating in the Berlin battles of the barricades (Bernstein; see Schoeps 1992), others serving as candidates for the Frankfurt and Stuttgart
National Assembly (Cotta; see Wagenbreth 1965, 1926; Rossmässler). Still others advocated antimonarchist and republican views (Assing), or, more moderately, combined "freedom and national unification" with a deference towards the monarchy
(Dove). They were opposed to absolutism in state as well as church but by and large not antireligious; several were Christianized Jews (Bernstein; Benfey) and a few
Catholics (Rau; Rossmässler converted to Catholicism in 1845). It is noteworthy, however, that all belonged to the liberal tradition in their respective faiths.

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The first major German Humboldt biography, Alexander von Humboldt. Ein biographisches Denkmal (Alexander von Humboldt. A Biographical Monument)
(Klencke 1851), was written by Philipp Friedrich Hermann Klencke (1813-81), a
Hanover surgeon and author of many popular books, the subject matter of which included stuttering, dental decay, cosmetics, food adulteration, intestinal worms, female virginity, the medicinal qualities of cod-liver oil, microscopy and more. The book was a great success, with new editions or reprints in 1852, 1859 (three editions), 1869, 1870, 1875 and 1882. Klencke was also a poet and novelist of some repute. He was an enthusiastic "Forty-eighter" who gave lyrical expression to his leftwing political feelings in a variety of poems glorifying democratic ideals, the Berlin battle of the barricades, and the cause of national unification: "Arise! rejoice, German brothers: / One Volk , one Germany again" (quoted by Zimmermann 1931, 72). In
1849 Klencke published an open letter
An seine Majestät den König von Preussen
(To His Majesty the King of Prussia), in which he expressed his opposition to absolutism and support for the constitutional monarchy: "Everything with the people, everything by the people" (Klencke 1849, 60; see also Hirsch 1964, 17; and Klencke
1854b; 1969). Science, too, should be common property, Klencke argued, and it was
Humboldt's role in science popularization that formed a main reason for his
"biographical monument" (Klencke 1850; 1854a, 1-8).
Other biographers agreed, among whom the left-wing democrat and science popularizer Otto Eduard Vincent Ule (1820-1876), who attributed the significance of
Cosmos to the fact that it reached the German Volk : with Humboldt's Cosmos
"Science merges with the people." The appearance of the first volume had been, he extolled, like a bolt of lightning at the start of a thunderstorm. With this book,
Humboldt had liberated the treasures of science from inside the dark walls of studies and laboratories and inspired a scientific "Volksliteratur" (Ule 1869, 137-138; see also
114).
Humboldt biography flourished during the 1850s and 1860s, peaking at his death in 1859 and the centennial of his birth in 1869. During this period, short biographical accounts of Humboldt, in most instances accompanied by a portrait, commonly appeared in popular illustrated weeklies, e.g., the Illustrirtes Volksblatt
(Illustrated Popular Paper) (1845), the Neue Illustrirte Zeitschrift für Hannover (New
Illustrated Magazine for Hanover) (1851), and Die Gartenlaube (The Bower) (1860).
The material was to a large extent extracted from Klencke. By 1869 the weekly

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Gartenlaube , which among the family periodicals enjoyed the greatest circulation with a quarter of a million subscriptions and a readership of several times that number and which was founded as an "organ of scientific enlightenment of the people" (Anon.
1902, 11), had published ten articles on Humboldt's life and work, and on seven occasions printed a portrait of him (editor's note in Rittershaus 1869, 577).
Humboldt was not only featured in popular literature; he was turned into a raison d'être for popular organizations as well. A number of the latter were named for
Humboldt thus projecting a left-wing interpretation of his legacy. The decade 1859-69 saw the founding of some 30 Humboldt Societies, which initiated the eponymous
Humboldt Festivals, held on the occasion of his birthday on September 14 of each year. The inspiration for these came from the Schiller Festivals, which in 1859, the centennial of Schiller's birth, had been particularly exuberant, assuming symbolic significance in the pursuit of national unification. Monism as an organised movement was to a significant extent the continuation of these energies and ideals .
Cosmos was thus instrumentalised in the cause of liberal politics, but its usefulness in the pursuit of "freedom and unification" went further yet. In a Germanspeaking world of "cuius regio, eius religio," religion was a force of particularism and with that of autocratic rule. If science was to act as a counterforce for national unification and freedom, religion had to be kept out. Cosmos contributed to the secularization of the study of nature which, next to popularization, was a major plank in the monist programme.
Monist secularization
There was more to Humboldt's choice of the title "cosmos" than its aestheticholistic physicalism, in that it made a break with contemporary practice of referring to the physical world in its entirety by using the term "creation." Hermann Burmeister's
Geschichte der Schöpfung is one of many possible examples that can be cited
(When later Haeckel used "Natürliche Sch öpfung sgeschichte," he intended a similar secularization but by means of an aggressive appropriation of the word "creation" on behalf of evolutionary monism). The title word "cosmos" indicated a truncated discourse of nature, in the sense that traditional religious language was omitted and with that the traditional homage paid to the ecclesiastical establishment.
God was not mentioned, and neither was Christianity, at least not in the usual sense as the supreme religion
– the victorious, ultimate outcome of the growth and

9 development of civilization. Such a mention was common towards the end of a general treatise on "natural history." Burmeister, for one, did so in conclusion to his
Geschichte der Schöpfung . By contrast, Humboldt relativized the beliefs of "Christian
Fathers" and "Hebrew Writers" by intercalating them in a series of descriptions of nature "at different Epochs and among different Races of Man" that contained views of nature by the Greeks, the Romans, the Indians, the Persians and, concluding the list, Goethe.
In the course of the nineteenth century, religious language disappeared from the professional scientific literature. This process has been referred to as the
"privatization" of religious belief among scientists. Many scientists came to share a methodological naturalism that avoided "God-talk," whether they kept a belief in God and human immortality or not. The study of nature was secularized, even if many practitioners, in their private lives, were not. Humboldt, as a major trend-setter of early- and mid-nineteenth-century science, significantly contributed to the removal from scientific discourse of references to tenets of the Christian faith by means of
Cosmos , which avoided references to God and to divine design.
The importance of his book in this connection, again is apparent from the reviews, which differed depending on both geographical and ideological space. The many and often lengthy reviews of the successively published volumes took clear and opposing stances. Both Catholics (e.g. in Austria) and Anglicans (in Great
Britain) objected. "Free-thinkers" in Germany and France applauded. By and large, the liberals drew comfort from Humboldt's mostly (but not entirely) implicit insistence that the realm of nature offers us knowledge that is of a different kind from that of
"higher speculative views."
To most of the British reviewers, Humboldt's demonstrations of the harmonies and beauty of the physical world required the mention of a Supreme Harmonizer. The absence of "proofs of divine design" was noted with dismay. Whereas in France the positivistically inclined orientalist-theologian Ernest Renan (1823-92), in his 13-page
Cosmos review for La liberté de penser , explicitly praised Humboldt for having avoided the language of natural theology "as it is understood in England," the British reviewers sorely missed references to "the power, wisdom and goodness of God as manifested in the creation," as the multi-author Cosmos -of-a-sort, the Bridgewater
Treatises, had put it. The Scottish physicist-geologist and Edinburgh professor of natural philosophy James D. Forbes (1809-1868) rebuked:

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We conceive it to be impossible for any well-constituted mind to contemplate the sum and totality of creation, to generalize its principles, to mark the curious relations of its parts, and especially the subtle chain of connexion and unity between beings and events apparently the most remote in space, time, and constitution, without referring more or less to the doctrine of final causes, and to the design of a superintending Providence. We call it the highest pedantry of intellect to put to silence suggestions which arise spontaneously in every mind, whether cultivated or not, when engaged in such contemplations; and we are sorry to observe in the work before us a silence on such topics so pointed as must attract the attention of at least every English reader ([Forbes]
1845-46, 163-164).
The clergyman-astronomer Thomas John Hussey (1797-1866/67(?)), in his
38-page essay for the Congregational British Quarterly Review went further, chiding
Humboldt not only for the omission of proper references to God, but for surreptitiously introducing Hegelian pantheism. This reproach echoed a wider concern that
Humboldt might be making common cause with Berlin's Hegelian radicals. Humboldt had shown "the very height of affectation, or something worse," by completing a treatise on the harmony of the natural world "without one reference to Him whom
Faith recognises as the Source and the Life of all things." Hussey did not feel that his review was the place for a conventional natural theology, but, he continued,
…if Baron Humboldt is at liberty to refer us on almost every page to the eternal order and the eternal laws of Nature, it were surely hard that we should be denied all right of reference to Him, the alone eternal, without whose preordination we assert that this order had never been, and without whose coordination, these laws had been powerless as the infant's whisper, to direct or control the worlds which hang upon them ([Hussey] 1846, 354).
To many of Humboldt's British critics, it was inconceivable that a general exposition of science should be without the stated aim that the study of nature leads up to nature's God; and a noticeable feature of the British reviews was that they added the argument of design to Cosmos . Thus Humboldt's book was

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"domesticated" for an English readership by making it consonant with natural theology.
The British press stood not alone when rebuking Humboldt for failing to raise the banner of orthodox Christianity. Religious conservatives in Prussia were in fact deeply disappointed that the author of Cosmos did not join "the victorious battle for the Christian revelation as foundation of German unity in church and state." Also on the Continent, especially in Catholic-conservative circles, accusations were made of
Hegelian radicalism or heterodoxy with respect to the biblical creation story; and the question was disquietly posed: "Does the author of Cosmos ever talk about God?"
The language of natural theology played a mediating role in bringing people of different Christian creeds together in a latitudinarian pursuit of science (see for example Morrell and Thackray ); but this applied to the English-speaking world, not to
Continental Europe. The mediating mission of Cosmos was was first and foremost at the level of socio-political divisions, nationally and internationally. An American commentator, James Davenport Welpley (1817-72), in an essay on the Cosmos the
Whig American Review , commented that those who studied the world and contemplated the connections of its multifarious phenomena were knitted together in an cosmopolitan network, "making common cause against ignorance and prejudice.
If the world is ever to be harmonized, it must be through a community of knowledge, for there is no other universal or non-exclusive principle in the nature of man"
(Welpley 1846, 603).
The monist Darwinization of Humboldt
When by 1870-71 a German nation-state became a reality, Humboldt lost some of his political significance and, together with a politically moderate evaluation of him, a more critical one by scientific professionals emerged. Some of Humboldt's fellow scientists had been restrained and differentiated in their appreciation of him all along. An obituary in the Deutsche Vierteljahrs-Schrift (German Quarterly) concluded that Humboldt had made no great discoveries and that his approach to the study of nature had become commonplace or obsolete (Anon. 1860d, 303-307).
In his defence, it was pointed out that he had been ahead of his time with respect to Darwinism. The Monists now developed Humboldt's connection to Darwin, who became the benchmark scientist of the second half of the nineteenth century and a symbol of the anti-ecclesiastical secularization of society. To them, Darwinism

12 was a vehicle of emancipation of the lower and middle classes and a necessary condition for cultural progress ("Kulturfortschritt") of the German Volk .
One remarkable instance of the "Darwinization" of Humboldt took place in
1883, on the occasion of the unveiling of the long-planned statue of Humboldt at
Berlin University. The University's rector, the physiologist Emil Heinrich Dubois-
Reymond (1818-1896), commented that Humboldt had been no Newton, Laplace or
Gauss, nor should he be compared to them: "The chasm that separated him from the pinnacle of scientific research was an insufficient grasp of physics and mathematics"
(Dubois-Reymond 1912, 263). On the positive side, Humboldt had been something of a Darwinist. Part of the apologia for, and sociopolitical instrumentalization of
Humboldt was to argue that he had not been quite as out-of-date by the time he died as some would have it, and that this could be demonstrated by the fact that he had been a Darwinist avant la lettre . Dubois-Reymond recalled:
Perhaps less well known is the fact that Humboldt was also a pre-
Darwinian Darwinist. He gave me the Essay on Classification that Louis Agassiz had sent him. In this essay, which was published only three years before the
Origin of Species
– which Humboldt did not live to see – the doctrine of the periods of creation and the teleological worldview was presented with clarity and precision, and seemingly supported by much evidence. Humboldt's remarks on this occasion left me in no doubt that, far from sharing Agassiz's views, he was a supporter of mechanical causality and an evolutionist. If we can trust certain Parisian [oral] traditions, then Humboldt and Cuvier were not on the best of terms, whereby political disagreements may well have played a role. Perhaps
Humboldt was closer to Lamarck and Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire and absorbed from them the theory of evolution (Dubois-Reymond 1912, 268).
Others made similar points. Humboldt would have objected to attacks on
Darwin's theory, Foerster maintained, and he would have agreed with a theory of evolution, not only as an explanation of nature but also of human history and society.
After all, he contended, Humboldt himself was an exemplary product of natural selection, having been carried to the very top of humanity by a Darwinian "struggle for life" (Foerster 1883, 15). A variety of popular of popular Humboldt biographies bracketed him with Darwin and Alfred Brehm (1829-84) (Wiesenthal 1924), with

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Darwin and Haeckel (Gumprecht 1927), or with Goethe, Darwin and Haeckel (May
1904).
An article on "Alexander von Humboldt and the notion of evolution" in Neue
Weltanschauung , the organ of the monist Humboldt League for a Scientific
Worldviewt, maintained that Humboldt would have approved of Darwin's theory.
Dubois-Reymond's testimony was quoted and the conclusion reached: "[W]e can say then that Humboldt came so close to the theory of evolution (including the doctrine of natural selection) as to have touched it" (Metze 1911b, 447). Such linkages of
Humboldt with Darwin were systematically developed by the monists.
A prominent Monist and Humboldtian was Wilhelm
Bölsche (1861-1939), one of the most successful science popularizers ever and author of such bestsellers as
Das Liebesleben in der Natur (1898) (Love-life in Nature). Brought up a free thinker, a Darwinist and a Humboldtian in the Varnhagen von Ense tradi tion, Bölsche was active in the Free Religious Congregation, a precursor to the Monist League, where he delivered "sermons" on, among others, Humboldt, who had been a "saint" of the religion of science and with whom popularization had begun (Bölsche 1891, 12-13).
Among Bölsche's writings were the first biography of "Germany's Darwin,"
Ernst
Haeckel: ein Lebensbild (1900) (Ernst Haeckel: Portrait of a Life) and a commemorative volume, Charles Darwin (1909), published on the occasion of the centennial of Darwin's birth.
Bölsche's efforts on behalf of popular education went well beyond science. He also played a radical role in German belles-lettres , professing that the fine arts, like the natural sciences, belonged to the people (Kauffeldt and Cepl-Kaufmann 1994,
242). He was co-editor of the Freie Bühne (Free Theatre) (later Die neue Rundschau
(The New Review)) and a representative of naturalism in German literature, gaining renown as a central figure in the Cultural History Society of Friedrichshagen, a
"Muses' court at [Lake] Müggelsee" (Friedrichshagen is a suburb of Berlin where the
Muggel Lake is located), an international colony of sexually liberated artists and poets (Kauffeldt and Cepl-Kaufmann 1994, 9).1 From here socialist impulses emanated for the founding of the Workers' Education Movement (Kauffeldt and Cepl-
1 The members included Bruno Wille (1860-1928), Julius and Heinrich Hart (1859-1930; 1855-1906), Carl and Gerhart Hauptmann (1858-1921; 1862-1946), August Strindberg (1849-1912), Gustav Landauer (1870-
1919), Erich Mühsam (1878-1934), Richard Dehmel (1863-1920), and Frank Wedekind (1864-1918).

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Kaufmann 1994, 152-168).2 On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of Humboldt's birth, Bölsche praised Humboldt's
Kosmos in the monism-related Kunstwart und
Kulturwart (Maintaining Art and Culture) as putting forth a view that was aesthetic, humanistic and comprehensive, and would help realize the socialist ideal of a Volk :
I believe that there is indeed a very great need for this today. We all are in want of natural science but not simply because it places on our table an improved electrical lamp. We need it as Humboldt envisioned it. Only in this way can natural science ever walk among the people, can it create a Volk (this creating a Volk seems to me to be the most important thing today), instead of just keeping a few lonely Fausts busy in their laboratories who amaze the masses but whom nobody understands (Bölsche 1919, 188).
Cosmos was conceived in first instance not as a specialized work for scholars but as a popular book for educated laymen, and it provided not only scientific instruction but also artistic pleasure. And this was epoch-making, because with it the first genuine popular science literature was produced. All of the brilliant subsequent publications in this field, such as Helmholtz's "Lectures and Speeches" or Haeckel's
"Natural History of Creation," were more or less conscious imitations (Metze 1913,
912).
The connection between Humboldt and Darwin became the central theme of the monist Humboldt representation and resulted in a characteristic biographical narrative, as in Goethe. Humboldt. Darwin. Haeckel (1904), written by the professor of zoology at Karlsruhe's Technical College, Walther May (1869-1927).3 Humboldt had been a Darwinian and Darwin an Humboldtian. The link with Darwin was argued first and foremost by connecting Humboldt's journey of exploration with the Beagle journey, during which Darwin had written letters expressing the greatest of admiration for Humboldt-the-traveler:
2 After World War I, Bölsche, with his Darwinism and Humboldtianism, lost ground among the workers, and the radical-socialist Urania , published in Jena from 1924 till 1933 when it was closed down by the Nazis, made little or no capital out of Humboldt (Hopwood 1996). Following World War II, however, the East
Germans not only revived Urania, but this popular scientific journal revived Humboldt.
3 Part of this was separately published under the title
Alexander von Humboldt und Charles Darwin (1911), a booklet that a decade earlier had appeared as an article in the Preussische Jahrbücher (The Prussian Annals)
(May 1901), edited by Hans Delbrück (1848-1929), an independent conservative known for liberalprogressive views. Like many of the Monists, May had a penchant for popularization and in addition to his book on Humboldt wrote Auf Darwin-Spuren (On Darwin's Tracks) (May 1907), Grosse Biologen. Bilder aus der Geschichte der Biologie (Great Biologists. Pictures from the History of Biology) (May 1914) and similar works.

15
All of these great insights with which Humboldt enriched science were in the end results of his American journey. The fundamental significance of this journey is therefore to be found in the fact that it supplied building blocks for the construction of a general theory of the world. Humboldt-the-traveler was the pioneer of an expanded view of the universe and it was in this respect that he touched Darwin-the-traveler (May 1911, 18).
Moreover, Darwin had explicitly acknowledged his debt to Humboldt's
Personal Narrative :
According to Darwin, no other book had even come close to exerting such an influence on him as this work by Humboldt did. He copies long passages from it about Tenerife and on excursions reads them aloud to his friends. The burning desire "to add even the most humble contribution to the noble structure of Natural Science" grows in him. His vocation as a naturalist becomes more and more clear, both to him and to others. Although eventually he takes the preliminary theological examination, he does not seriously consider becoming a clergyman. And this plan is completely abandoned when, with his circumnavigation of the world on board the "Beagle," his fondest travel dreams are realized more quickly than expected (May 1911, 14).
Both Humboldt and Darwin had been opponents of ecclesiastical dogmatism and enthusiastic liberals in matters of politics. Humboldt had possessed a clear notion of "the struggle for life" and had objected to the traditional creation story as well as to the notion of a spontaneous generation of life, even though he had not actually subscribed to the hypothesis of the descent of humans from animals:
He felt that the time was not yet ripe to give an answer to this difficult question; yet had he lived to read Darwin's work, it would most likely have appeared also to him a step forward on the path to solving the puzzle. The preconditions for this were certainly present in his mind, however unjustified it may be for Dubois-Reymond to call him, on the basis of one critical comment about Agassiz, a Pre-Darwinian Darwinist and an evolutionist (May 1911, 36).

16
In summary , the German monists of the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth turned Humboldt into one of their great proponents. This was done primarily on the basis of Cosmos , which had led the way in the popular spread as well as the secularization of the sciences and thus helped in the quest for liberalization and national unification of the German Volk . After the goal of unity had been attained in 1871, Humboldt's name continued to be instrumentalized on behalf of the monist cause by linking it to Darwin's.
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