Whilst reading John Sears' Sacred places : American tourist attractions in the nineteenth century (Oxford, 1989), primarily because of its descriptions of travellers' descriptions of Niagara Falls as a destination, about which Margaret Fuller also wrote in her Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, I came upon a line mentioning Alexander von Humboldt's Cosmos... a kind of eureka! moment for sure!
Googling around, I discovered a recent book by Laura Dessow Walls, A Passage to Cosmos (Chicago, 2009). I was over the moon when discovering this book and couldn't wait to get to Foyles to get it. So far it's proven very very interesting; haven't read this hungrily since childhood!
On Page 153 there's a mention of Wilhelm von Humboldt's essay "On the Historian's Task" (I think):
"The key, Wilhelm had said, was to use the method of the artist to grasp the truth of nature organically from within, to study "the way in in which the outward shape emerges from the idea and structure of the whole". Now, that does surely remind me a bit of Plotinus.. where does this come from? Goethe? Via Plotinus? Via someone else? I know from Daniel Walker Howe's Making the American self : Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Cambridge, Mass., 1997) that there was a huge stream of Platonism/Plotinian thought coming into the United States, particularly after Thomas Taylor's translations into English, so can these Plotinian streams be gathered and connected?
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