Humboldt

The Oration

Delivered in 1869 on the centenary of Humboldt's birth, this oration marked the beginning of Ingersoll's public career as a freethinker. Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) was the greatest naturalist of the early nineteenth century — a scientist, explorer, and humanist whose work helped lay the foundations of modern geography, ecology, and evolutionary biology.

The Greatest Naturalist

Alexander von Humboldt was the greatest naturalist who ever lived. This is not a claim that I make lightly. I have read widely in the literature of natural science, and I have found no one who combined, as Humboldt did, the range of observation, the depth of understanding, the precision of thought, and the beauty of expression that characterize his work.

He explored five continents. He climbed Chimborazo in the Andes — at that time believed to be the highest mountain in the world — and took scientific measurements at every altitude. He traced the patterns of vegetation across the globe and showed that they responded to climate in systematic, predictable ways. He charted the ocean current that still bears his name. He connected the phenomena of the natural world into a single, intelligible system.

And he did all of this without God.

Not that Humboldt was atheist, in the strict sense. He rarely discussed his religious views directly. But his entire method — the patient accumulation of evidence, the systematic testing of hypotheses, the refusal to appeal to supernatural agency when natural explanation was available — was the method of the scientist, not the theologian.

Science as Wonder

What I love most about Humboldt is that he never allowed science to diminish his sense of wonder. For some people — I have met them — science kills the poetry of the world. If you know the physics of a rainbow, they say, it is no longer beautiful.

I disagree entirely. I think knowledge deepens wonder, not diminishes it. The rainbow is no less beautiful for knowing its physics; it is more beautiful, because we understand something of the mechanism by which light and water conspire to produce it. The night sky is no less magnificent for knowing that each point of light is a sun — many of them incomparably larger than our own — at distances too great for ordinary imagination. It is more magnificent.

Humboldt felt this. His science was saturated with awe. His great work, Cosmos, is not merely a scientific treatise but a love letter to the universe — a sustained expression of wonder at the intelligibility and beauty of the natural world.

"Nature is not silent; she speaks to us in a thousand voices. The man who has learned to listen finds that every fact becomes a window onto infinity."

A Scientist Without God

It is said that on his deathbed, the King of Prussia asked Humboldt to confess his faith. Humboldt, who was ninety years old and dying, reportedly replied that he had no faith to confess.

Whether or not this story is exactly true, it captures something essential about Humboldt. He lived his entire intellectual life without appealing to the supernatural. He found the natural world — studied with patience, understood with rigor, described with beauty — entirely sufficient.

This is, I think, the highest form of courage available to an intellectual: the willingness to accept the world as it is, rather than as we would like it to be.

The Humanity of Science

But what I want especially to praise in Humboldt is his humanity. He was not merely a scientist; he was a humane man.

He was an opponent of slavery. In South America, he witnessed the institution directly and was appalled. He wrote against it with passion and precision, decades before the American Civil War.

He was a champion of indigenous rights — genuinely interested in the cultures and peoples he encountered in his travels, not merely as specimens to be catalogued, but as human beings with complex civilizations worth understanding and respecting.

He was generous to younger scientists, spending enormous amounts of his own time and money to support the careers of those who came after him.

He was, in short, a good man as well as a great scientist. And I believe — contrary to those who claim that science tends to produce moral indifference — that his goodness was connected to his science. His habit of looking carefully at the world, of seeing it as it actually was rather than as convenience or tradition suggested, gave him the clarity to see the suffering of others for what it was.

The Lesson of Humboldt

What can we learn from Humboldt?

We can learn that the natural world is inexhaustibly interesting — that careful attention reveals depths of order and beauty that no mythology has ever approached.

We can learn that the scientific method — patient, humble, self-correcting — is not the enemy of wonder but its highest expression.

We can learn that it is possible to face the universe without a god and find it, if anything, more magnificent for the honesty.

And we can learn that a life devoted to the enlargement of human knowledge, generously shared, is a life well spent.

"He who has learned to look with his own eyes at the world — not through the eyes of tradition, not through the spectacles of dogma — has learned the beginning of wisdom."

The complete "Humboldt" oration appears in Volume 3 of the Dresden Edition.