Alexander von Humboldt: Galvanism,Animal Electricity,and Self-Experimentation Part 2: The Electric Eel,Animal Electricity,and Later Years

After extensive experimentation during the 1790s, Alexander von Humboldt remained skeptical about “animal electricity” (and metallic electricity), writing instead about an ill-defined galvanic force. With his worldview and wishing to learn more, he studied electric eels in South America just as the new century began, again using his body as a scientific instrument in many of his experiments. As had been the case in the past and for many of the same reasons, some of his findings with the electric eel (and soon after, Italian torpedoes) seemed to argue against biological electricity. But he no longer used galvanic terminology when describing his electric fish experiments. The fact that he now wrote about animal electricity rather than a different “galvanic” force owed much to Alessandro Volta, who had come forth with his “pile” (battery) for multipling the physical and perceptable effects of otherwise weak electricity in 1800, while Humboldt was deep in South America. Humboldt probably read about and saw voltaic batteries in the United States in 1804, but the time he spent with Volta in 1805 was probably more significant in his conversion from a galvanic to an electrical framework for understanding nerve and muscle physiology. Although he did not continue his animal electricity research program after this time, Humboldt retained his worldview of a unified nature and continued to believe in intrinsic animal electricity. He also served as a patron to some of the most important figures in the new field of electrophysiology (e.g., Hermann Helmholtz and Emil du Bois-Reymond), helping to take the research that he had participated in to the next level.     

Mind and nature the physical geography of Alexander Von Humboldt

PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY

Foundations of Climatology. By E. T. Stringer, xiii+586 pp., 194 illustrations. Techniques of Climatology. By E. T. Stringer, xiii+539 pp. 124 illustrations. Both books 10 1/4×7 3/4: W. H. Freeman, Reading, 1972. £6.30.

ECONOMIC GEOGRAPHY

Land, work and resources: an introduction to economic geography. By J. H. Paterson. 15 × 22.75 cms: xiv + 266 pp. 43 maps and diagrams. Edward Arnold, London, 1972. £3.60 (boards), £1.80 (paper).

A Geography of Trade and Development in Malaya. By P. P. Courtenay. 7 1/2 × 5 1/4, xii+286 pp., 28 maps, and 52 tables. Bell's Advanced Economic Geographies, London, 1972. £3.

SOCIAL GEOGRAPHY

Population Geography and the Developing Countries. By John I. Clarke. 8 1/4 × 5 3/4, xiii+282 pp., 43 ilust. Pergamon, Oxford, 1971. £1.75.

Cities and Immigrants. By David Ward, 9 1/4×6 1/4, xv+164 pp., 24 figures, 27 photographs, 17 tables, Bibliography, index. Oxford University Press, London 1971. £3.

REGIONAL

The Greeks how they live and work. By T. R. B. Dicks. 8 3/4 × 5 3/4, 175 pp., 16 illust. David &; Charles. Newton Abbot, 1972. £2.25.

Melanesia: a geographical interpretation of an island world. By H. C. Brookfield with Doreen Hart. 9 1/2×6 1/2, lx+463 pp., 76 figures, 46 tables, 24 plates, indexes. Methuen, London, 1971. £6.25.

Africa and Its Explorers. Edited by Robert I. Rotberg. 9 1/2×6 1/2, 351pp. London, Oxford University Press, 1971. £3.75.

Scandinavia. By B. Fullerton and A. F. Williams. 9×6, xiv+374 pp., 64 maps and diagrams 34 tables. Chatto &; Windus, London, 1972. £3.

EDUCATIONAL

Geography in Secondary Education. By N. J. Graves. 9 3/4 × 7 1/2 125 pp. 41 figs., References. Bibliographies. Geographical Association. Sheffield, 1971. 85p.     

Alexander von Stael-Holstein and his Sino-Indian Institute

Alexander von Stael-Holstein （I877-I937） was a world famous Russian orientalist who, in the early part of the 2oth century, lived permanently in Beijing for various reasons.＇ On the recommendation of Hu Shi胡适, he received a teaching position at Peking University. In i929 he was formally appointed professor of Central Asian Philology at Harvard University, staying there for one academic year. Although a Harvard professor, he did not stay in the United States, but continued to live in Peking, directing his Sino-Indian Institute （SII） which he had founded in i927. After receiving the Harvard professorship, the Sino-Indian Institute became part of the Harvard-Yenching Institute （the HYI）. As he wrote, only in Beijing could he do his beloved research on Buddhist texts in Sanskrit, Tibetan and Chi- nese. At the SII, he received American students sent by the HYI, as well as young scholars from various countries who came to study Buddhist texts. This paper will present this well- known academic story, based on Stael-Holstein＇s correspondence that is preserved at the Harvard-Yenching Library, of which most is in English, but some are in German, French and Russian.     

Alexander von Humboldt's invention of the natural landscape

Landscape took on a new meaning through the new science of plant geography of Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1857). In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, “landscape” was foremost a painterly genre. Slowly, painted landscapes came to bear on natural surroundings, but by 1800 it was still not common to designate sites as “landscapes.” Humboldt looked at plant vegetation with a painterly gaze. Artists, according to him, could suggest in their work that an abstract unity lay hidden underneath observable phenomena. Humboldt projected painted landscapes on nature and found its ecological unity. By doing so, he ultimately stripped the concept of landscape from its primary visual meaning.     

Sentiment,Sensation and Sensibility: Adam Smith,Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis and Wilhelm von Humboldt

Summary

This article focuses on the analysis of sensibility in the works of three major late eighteenth-century philosophers: Smith, Cabanis and the young Wilhelm von Humboldt. It analyses to what extent Smith's concept of sympathy influenced Cabanis in France and Humboldt in Germany. It argues that modern anthropology, based on a specific theory of sensibility, assumes a strong connection between knowledge acquisition and life in society. This article reveals the strong links between the three authors which were made possible precisely because of their common philosophical background. It proves, for the first time, that Humboldt had access to Condillac's ideas before 1798, since in an early work on the state, the former makes numerous borrowings from speeches Cabanis wrote for Mirabeau, which were in turn strongly influenced by Condillac.     

Between Leibniz and Kant: The Political Thought of Wilhelm von Humboldt

Abstract

In his early text, The Limits of State Action, Wilhelm von Humboldt raises the Kantian question of the permissibility and legitimate extent of political and juridical coercion, as his contribution to a debate amongst Kantians launched by the publication in 1785 of Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals. In arguing for a minimal state, concerned exclusively with internal and external security of its members but not at all with their felicity, Humboldt inflects Kantian political thought in the direction of a liberal laissez-faire state, in marked contrast to the strong interventionism that his fellow-Kantian Fichte derived from similar Kantian grounds. The article argues that the underlying conception of the individual retained by Humboldt has markedly Leibnizian traits, namely the notion of freedom as the spontaneous unfolding of a highly personal, monadic developmental trajectory toward perfection, which ought not to be impeded or homogenized by unnecessary state intervention. Humboldt thus represents not only a ‘rightist’ libertarian reading of Kant, but a particular appropriation of significant Leibnizian themes. His combination of these sources is compared with that of other contemporary theorists like Hufeland and Fichte.