ction of phenomena is the primary aim
of all natural investigation. He was infinitely practical.

Origin and destiny were questions with which he had nothing to do.

His surroundings made him what he was.

In accordance with a law not fully comprehended, he was a production of
his time.

Great men do not live alone; they are surrounded by the great; they are
the instruments used to accomplish the tendencies of their generation;
they fulfill the prophecies of their age.

Nearly all of the scientific men of the eighteenth century had the same
idea entertained by Humboldt, but most of them in a dim and confused
way. There was, however, a general belief among the intelligent that
the world is governed by law, and that there really exists a connection
between all facts, or that all facts are simply the different aspects
of a general fact, and that the task of science is to discover this
connection; to comprehend this general fact or to announce the laws of
things.

Germany was full of thought, and her universities swarmed with
philosophers and grand thinkers in every department of knowledge.

Humboldt was the friend and companion of the greatest poets,
historians, philologists, artists, statesmen, critics and logicians of
his time.

He was the companion of Schiller, who believed that man would be
regenerated through the influence of the beautiful; of Goethe, the
grand patriarch of German literature; of Wieland, who has been called
the Voltaire of Germany; of Herder, who wrote the outlines of a
philosophical history of man; of Kotzebue, who lived in the world of
romance; of Schleiermacher, the pantheist; of Schlegel, who gave to his
country the enchanted realm of Shakespeare--of the sublime Kant, author
of the first work published in Germany on Pure Reason; of Fichte, the
infinite idealist; of Schopenhauer, the European Buddhist who followed
the great Gautama to the painless and dreamless Nirvana, and of
hundreds of others whose names are familiar to and honored by the
scientific world.

The German mind had been grandly roused from the long lethargy of the
dark ages of ignorance, fear and faith. Guided by the holy light of
reason, every department of knowledge was investigated, enriched and
illustrated.

Humboldt breathed the atmosphere of investigation; old ideas were
abandoned; old creeds, hallowed by centuries, were thrown aside;
thought became courageous; the athlete, Reason, challenged to mortal
combat t