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10 POLITICS AND HISTORY BIOGRAPHY: SELF AND OTHERS To grasp something quickly is what the mind is fitted for; but to do something worthwhile, for that one needs a lifetime of practice. —Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Italian Journey, 17 February 1787 The first forty years of our life supply the text; the next thirty add the commentary. —Arthur Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena, 1851 Du Bois-Reymond’s speeches found an enormous response. Crowds listened to him as dean and rector of the university, as perpetual secretary of the Academy of Sciences, as keynote speaker at annual meetings of the Congress of German Scientists and Physicians, as a guest of the Royal Institution, and as a star of the Urania, a popular theater of science in Berlin. His lectures circulated in the Deutsche Rundschau (the leading German journal of ideas), in reprints, in translations for the foreign press, and in readers for students of German. Journalists analyzed his remarks, politicians debated his proposals, clergymen attacked his apostasies, poets honored his example, satirists parodied his style, and bookshops displayed his portrait, which hung for sale next to those of the royal family. “Few, if any scholars now living,” the mathematician James Howard Gore wrote in 1895, “have exercised directly, as well as through their students, such a wide-spread influence as can be ascribed to this greatest of all German scientists.”1 Du Bois-Reymond’s fame was based on literacy. Berlin alone supported dozens of publishers, booksellers, and newspapers. Novels serialized in dailies or rented at railway stations attracted the largest readership, but serious writing also had an appeal, especially to a middle class given to identifying with the ideals of culture. In this respect, du BoisReymond ’s popularity is indicative of the strength of German liberalism in the 1860s, 208 CHAPTER 10 the 1870s, and the 1880s, a period when members of the educated elite could still argue that they represented the nation’s values, institutions, and politics.2 Alexander von Humboldt offered du Bois-Reymond the most obvious model of a public intellectual. Both men read French, both saw science as progress, and both imagined Berlin as the center of modern enlightenment; moreover, each of them wrote well, produced much, and aimed wide.Where they diverged was in outlook. Humboldt worked behind the scenes, shaping policy through advice and association; du BoisReymond acted in full view, using occasions at the Academy and at the university to influence opinion. Humboldt focused on the idea of Bildung, whereas du BoisReymond stressed the theme of limitation. Their difference was a product of their contexts: Humboldt’s narratives emphasized choice in a time of political, economic, and cultural constraint; du Bois-Reymond’s narratives emphasized constraint in a time of political, economic, and cultural choice.The contrast in outlook illustrates the pattern of change in du Bois-Reymond’s life as well as in his society. The pattern is less confusing than it may appear. As was noted in chapter 6, differences are easier to characterize than essences. Historians have often conflated the two—for example, in forgetting that German nationalism originated as a movement on the margins, or in believing that complaints by a few German intellectuals indicated widespread despair. Du Bois-Reymond’s essays emphasized restraint because he was confident.The secure can afford to admit doubt; the insecure prefer certainty.3 The speeches that du Bois-Reymond composed to welcome new members to the Academy of Sciences exhibit this character of analysis. Charged with laying tribute to his subjects’careers,du Bois-Reymond used the occasions to address the state of science more generally, much as Maupertuis had done in Berlin and as Fontenelle, d’Alembert, Condorcet, Cuvier, Arago, and Flourens had done in Paris. Over the years, du BoisReymond reviewed the fields of microbiology, electrotechnology, pathological anatomy, cellular biology, mineralogy, meteorology, botany, physiology, embryology, anthropometry , histology, zoology, oceanography, physics, geology, and chemistry. Preparation for his lectures on contemporary science suited him well to the task. Many of his assessments have become standard, especially his discussion of the disciplinary immaturity of chemistry.4 The best of his eulogies remains his “Memorial to Hermann von Helmholtz.”This was the last of his speeches, written for the Leibniz Session of the Academy, a celebration that marked the highlight of the institution’s calendar. The valediction was held on 4 July 1895, a full ten months after Helmholtz’s demise, in a modest hall that surprised an American witness accustomed to greater ceremony...

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