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Show 127 This impulse toward objective observation was particularly strong in the nineteenth century, as scientists sought to complete Newton's mathematical description. It was believed that eventually every observable phenomenon could be explained and reduced to a set of equations subsumed within this all-encompassing universal natural law. 11. For the theories of these early naturalists and their impact on European perception of America, see Hugh Honour, The New Golden Land (New York: Pantheon Books, 1975), pp. 131-132. In this book Honour observes that To a large extent many of the theories prevalent at this time were based on the speculations of the Comte Georges-Louis Leclerc Button, who in the mid-eighteenth century had published what was considered scientific proof of the genetic inferiority of all life inhabiting the Americas. He based this conclusion on the climate of America, which he believed, had emerged from the waters of the flood later than the continents of the Old World and was, therefore, still somewhat humid.....This preposterous theory was to be widely popularized and repeated during the next 150 years......Eighteenth-century philosophical history of the American Indian was also affected by Buffon. The image of the American Indian that emerged from this theory was one that was backward, weak, and degenerate. Honour also argues that the taste for exoticism so prevalent in the seventeenth century, although initially inspired by the naturalists, was also an aspect of the European attitude of superiority. 12. Based upon the literary foundations of Goethe, early nineteenth-century scientists devised a romantic evolutionary science that would be known as Naturphilosophie. Friedrich Blumenbach, whose students included both Humboldt and Maximilian and who was considered by many the father of modern anthropology, was the central influence surrounding the scientific renaissance in nineteenth-century central Europe. A professor of natural history and anatomy at Gottingen University, Blumenbach, "the German Buffon," also believed in epigenesis, the theory that all peoples had descended from a single set of parents. However, also like Buffon, Blumenbach attempted to explain the dissimilarities observed in different races in somewhat subjective terms. He tended toward the belief that the inhabitants of America were in a late stage of evolutionary degeneration, and it was at least partially to find an answer to this that Maximilian had made his first expedition to Brazil. To varying degrees, Maximilian and his contemporaries, including Alexander von Humboldt, Carl Friedrich Phillip von |
