Q2121The most dangerous worldview is the worldview of those who have not viewed the world.
Humboldt scholars cannot find it anywhere in his enormous output, and they have searched. The earliest match is a short verse by Moritz Goldschmidt in a Munich arts paper in 1895, thirty-six years after Humboldt died; his name was attached in the 1980s. The irony is that the sentiment fits. Humboldt climbed Chimborazo, crawled through Amazon tributaries, and came home arguing that nature is one connected whole — an idea he could only have reached by going and looking.