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Chicago Sun and the
St. Louis
Post-Dispatch. The Lasches were determinedly secular, and read American history as it had been written by Charles and Mary Beard and the progressive historians the struggle of a resolutely enlightened people against the lies and malevolence of the wealthy and powerful. The social legislation of the New Deal years confirmed Zora and Robert’s belief that American history proceeded in a straight line, its occasional jaggedness entirely the result of temporary accidents that could be remedied by right-thinking people like themselves. They were immensely proud of their son, an only child, but when he became fascinated with history’s temporary accidents they grew anxious that he would abandon familial convictions. Lasch remained in close and loving touch with his parents throughout his life, but he discarded their intellectual and political pieties as he grew older. He had considered a literary career and experimented with short stories and a novel. His
The presiding scientific genius of the Romantic age, when science had not yet been dispersed into specialties that rarely connect with one another, Alexander von Humboldt wanted to know everything, and came closer than any of his contemporaries to doing so. Except for Aristotle, no scientist before or since this German polymath can boast an intellect as universal in reach as his and as influential for the salient work of his time. His neglect today is unfortunate but instructive.
Humboldt (1769–1859) undertook to disseminate the knowledge he acquired as rapidly and widely as possible, and initiated a network of correspondents among the world’s principal scientific specialists. Thus, Humboldt’s prodigious achievement ironically made it impossible for his scientific descendants to have a career so wondrously varied as his. Taking the entirety of nature and culture as his province, through the gathering and arrangement of all the particulars that one extraordinary mind could hold