Carl Ritter (August 7, 1779 – September 28, 1859) was a German geographer. Along with Alexander von Humboldt, he is considered one of the founders of modern geography. From 1825 until his death, he occupied the first chair in geography at the University of Berlin.

Alexander von Humboldt Carl Ritter

the founders of modern geography.

Full name

Immanuel Kant

Born 22 April 1724Königsberg, Prussia

Died 12 February 1804 (aged 79)Königsberg, Prussia

School/ tradition

Kantianism, enlightenment philosophy

Main interests

Epistemology, Metaphysics,Ethics, Logic

Notable ideas

Categorical imperative,Transcendental Idealism,Synthetic a priori,Noumenon, Sapere aude,Nebular hypothesis

Kant, Immanuel, 1724-1804The Critique of Practical Reason (English)

The Critique of Pure Reason (English)Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals

 (English)Kritik der reinen Vernunft (Erste Fassung 1781) (German)

Kritik der reinen Vernunft Zweite hin und wieder verbesserte Auflage (1787) (German)

The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics (English)On the Popular Judgment: That may be Right in Theory,but does not Hold Good in the Praxis

 (English)Perpetual Peace: A Philosophic Essay (English)

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Born in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia), April 22, 1724, Kant received his education at the Collegium Fredericianum and the University of Königsberg. At the college he studied chiefly the classics, and at the university he studied physics and mathematics. After his father died, he was compelled to halt his university career and earn his living as a private tutor. In 1755, aided by a friend, he resumed his studies and obtained his doctorate. Thereafter, for 15 years he taught at the university, lecturing first on science and mathematics, but gradually enlarging his field of concentration to cover almost all branches of philosophy.Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009.

Although Kant's lectures and works written during this period established his reputation as an original philosopher, he did not receive a chair at the university until 1770, when he was made professor of logic and metaphysics. For the next 27 years he continued to teach and attracted large numbers of students to Königsberg. Kant's unorthodox religious teachings, which were based on rationalism rather than revelation, brought him into conflict with the government of Prussia, and in 1792 he was forbidden by Frederick William II, king of Prussia, to teach or write on religious subjects. Kant obeyed this order for five years until the death of the king and then felt released from his obligation. In 1798, the year following his retirement from the university, he published a summary of his religious views. He died February 12, 1804. Microsoft ® Encarta ® 2009.

Because no suitable textbooks were available, the Prussian government allowed Kant to lecture from his own manuscript, the so-called Diktattext.  This text, available to us in the form of the an-Holstein-Beck notes, has the following structure:I. General§1: History of the oceans.§2: History of lands and islands.§3: Earthquakes and volcanoes.§4: History of springs and wells.§5: History of rivers.§6: History of wind-currents.§7: On the relationship between the weather and the seasons.§8: History of the great changes that the earth has suffered, and is still suffering.§9: On seafaring.II. The three kingdoms§1: On human beings (differences in culture and skin coloration).§2: The animal kingdom.§3: The plant kingdom.§4: The mineral kingdom.III. The four parts of the world: Asia, Africa, Europe, America.

During the 18th century, the German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) proposed that human knowledge could be organized in three different ways. One way of organizing knowledge was to classify its facts according to the type of objects studied. Accordingly, zoology studies animals, botany examines plants, and geology involves the investigation of rocks. The second way one can study things is according to a temporal dimension. This field of knowledge is of course called history. The last method of organizing knowledge involves understanding facts relative to spatial relationships. This field of knowledge is commonly known as geography. Kant also divided geography into a number of sub-disciplines. He recognized the following six branches: Physical, mathematical, moral, political, commercial, and theological geography.Geographic knowledge saw strong growth in Europe and the United States in the 1800s. This period also saw the emergence of a number of societies interested in geographic issues. In Germany, Alexander von Humboldt, Carl Ritter, and Fredrich Ratzel made substantial contributions to human and physical geography. Humboldt's publicationKosmos (1844) examines the geology and physical geography of the Earth. This work is considered by many academics to be a milestone contribution to geographic scholarship. Late in the 19th Century, Ratzel theorized that the distribution and culture of the Earth's various human populations was strongly influenced by the natural environment. The French geographer Paul Vidal de la Blanche opposed this revolutionary idea. Instead, he suggested that human beings were a dominant force shaping the form of the environment. The idea that humans were modifying the physical environment was also prevalent in the United States. In 1847, George Perkins Marsh gave an address to the Agricultural Society of Rutland County, Vermont. The subject of this speech was that human activity was having a destructive impact on land, especially through deforestation and land conversion. This speech also became the foundation for his book Man and Nature or The Earth as Modified by Human Action, first published in 1864. In this publication, Marsh warned of the ecological consequences of the continued development of the American frontier.

His LifeImmanuel Kant was born on 22 April 1724 in Königsberg, the capital of East Prussia. He was the child of poor but devout followers of Pietism, a Lutheran revival movement stressing love and good works, simplicity of worship, and individual access to God. Kant's promise was recognized by the Pietist minister Franz Albert Schultz, and he received a free education at the Pietist gymnasium. At sixteen, Kant entered the University of Königsberg, where he studied mathematics, physics, philosophy, theology, and classical Latin literature. His leading teacher was Martin Knutzen (1713-51), who introduced him to both Wolffian philosophy and Newtonian physics, and who inspired some of Kant's own later views and philosophical independence by his advocacy of physical influx against the pre-established harmony of Leibniz and Wolff. Kant left university in 1746, just as the major works of the anti- Wolffian Pietist philosopher Christian August Crusius were appearing. Kant's upbringing would have made him receptive to Crusius, and thus he left university imbued with the Enlightenment aims of Wolffian philosophy but already familiar with technical criticisms of it, especially with Crusius's critique of Wolff's attempt to derive substantive conclusions from a single and merely formal first principle such as the logical principle of non-contradiction (see Wolff, C. ).

On leaving university, Kant completed his first work, Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (1746, published 1749), an unsuccessful attempt to mediate between Cartesian and Leibnizian theories of physical forces. Kant then worked as a tutor, serving in households near Königsberg for the next eight years. When he returned to the university in 1755, however, he had several works ready for publication. The first of these was Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens, a much more successful scientific work than his first in which Kant argued for the nebular hypothesis, or origin of the solar system out of a nebular mass by purely mechanical means. The book was scarcely known during Kant's lifetime, however, so the French astronomer Pierre Laplace (1749-1827) developed his version of the nebular hypothesis (published 1796) independently, and the theory became known as the Kant-Laplace hypothesis only later. In 1755, Kant also published two Latin works, his MA thesis A brief presentation of some thoughts concerning fire, and his first philosophical work, A new elucidation of the first principles of metaphysical cognition, which earned him the right to offer lectures at the university as a Privatdozent paid directly by his students. The following year Kant published The employment in natural philosophy of metaphysics combined with geometry, of which sample I contains the physical monadology , which made him eligible for a salaried professorship, although he was not to receive one until 1770. In these years, Kant also published four essays on earthquakes and winds.

Kant began lecturing in the autumn of 1755, and to earn a living lectured more than twenty hours a week. His topics included logic, metaphysics, ethics, and physics, and he subsequently added physical geography, anthropology (Germany's first lectures so entitled), pedagogy, natural right and even the theory of fortifications. Except for one small essay on optimism (1759), he did not publish again until 1762, when another burst of publications began. He then published, all in German: The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures (1762); The Only Possible Argument in support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God and Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy (1763); Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and Inquiry concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (1764), the latter of which was his second-place entry in a competition won by Moses Mendelssohn; Dreams of a Spirit-Seer, elucidated by Dreams of Metaphysics (1766); and Concerning the Ultimate Ground of the Differentiation of Directions in Space (1768). These publications earned Kant widespread recognition in Germany. During this period, Kant was deeply struck by the work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, especially by his Social Contract and the paean to freedom in Émile (both 1762). By this time Kant was also acquainted with the philosophy of David Hume, whose two Enquiries and other essays, but not A Treatise of Human Nature , were published in German as early as 1755.

Having unsuccessfully applied for several chairs at home while declining offers elsewhere, Kant was finally appointed Professor of Logic and Metaphysics in Königsberg in 1770. This event occasioned his inaugural dissertation, and last Latin work, On the form and principles of the sensible and intelligible world. Following correspondence about this work with Johann Heinrich Lambert, Johann Georg Sulzer, and Mendelssohn, however, Kant fell into another decade-long silence, broken only by a few progress reports to his recent student Marcus Herz and a few minor essays. Yet during this 'silent decade', Kant was preparing for his enormous body of subsequent works. Beginning in 1781, with the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant released a steady torrent of books. These include: Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics that shall come forth as Scientific, an attempted popularization of the first Critique, in 1783; two essays, 'Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View' and 'What is Enlightenment?' in 1784; The Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals and four other essays in 1785; The Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, essays on 'The Conjectural Beginnings of Human History' and 'What Does it mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?' and two other pieces in 1786; a substantially revised second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason in 1787; in 1788, the Critique of Practical Reason and an essay on 'The Use of Teleological Principles in Philosophy'; the Critique of the Power of Judgment as well as an important polemic 'On a discovery according to which any new Critique of Pure Reason is rendered dispensable by an older one' in 1790; the political essay 'On the Common Saying: "That may be right in theory but does not work in practice"' and the controversial Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone in 1793; Towards Perpetual Peace in 1795; the Metaphysics of Morals, comprising the 'Doctrine of Right' and the ' Doctrine of Virtue', in 1797, as well as the essay 'On a putative Right to Lie from Love of Mankind'; and his last major works in 1798, a handbook on Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View and his defence of the intellectual freedom of the philosophical faculty from religious and legal censorship in the restrictive atmosphere of Prussia after Frederick the Great, The Conflict of the Faculties. (With Kant's approval, some of his other lecture courses were also published, including Logic in 1800 and Physical Geography and Pedagogy in 1804.) Kant retired from lecturing in 1797, at the age of seventy-three, and devoted his remaining years to a work which was to be entitled 'The Transition from the Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science to Physics', but which was far from complete when Kant ceased working on it in 1803. (Selections from his drafts were first published in 1882-4, and they were first fully published as Opus postumum in 1936-8). After a lifetime of hypochondria without any serious illness, Kant gradually lost his eyesight and strength and died 12 February 1804.

--His BeliefsKant's moral philosophy

Kant developed his moral philosophy in three works: Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785), Critique of Practical Reason (1788), andMetaphysics of Morals (1798).Kant is known for his theory that there is a single moral obligation, which he called the Categorical Imperative, from which all other moral obligations are generated. He believed that the moral law is a principle of reason itself, and is not based on contingent facts about the world (e.g., what would make us happy). Accordingly, he believed that moral obligation applies to all and only rational agents.A categorical imperative is an unconditional obligation; that is, it has the force of an obligation regardless of our will or desires. (Contrast this with hypothetical imperative.) Kant's categorical imperative was formulated in three ways, which he believed to be roughly equivalent (although many commentators do not):The first formulation (Formula of Universal Law) says: "Act as if the maxim of thy action were to become by thy will a universal law of nature."The second formulation (Formula of Humanity) says: "Act that you use humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means."The third formulation (Formula of Autonomy) is a synthesis of the first two. It says that we should so act that we may think of ourselves as legislating universal laws through our maxims. We may think of ourselves as such autonomous legislators only insofar as we follow our own laws. Example of the first formulation:The most popular interpretation of the first formulation is called the "universalizability test." An agent's maxim, according to Kant, is his "subjective principle of volition" — that is, what the agent believes is his reason to act. The universalizability test has five steps:Find the agent's maxim.Imagine a possible world in which everyone in a similar position to the real-world agent followed that maxim.Decide whether any contradictions, or irrationalities, arise in the possible world as a result of following the maxim.If a contradiction or irrationality arises, acting on that maxim is not allowed in the real world.If there is no contradiction, then acting on that maxim is permissible, and in some instances required.There are two types of contradiction that Kant thinks may arise with impermissible maxims. The first type he calls "contradictions in conception." Kant uses the example of a false promise to illustrate this. His imagined agent has the maxim: "I am going to lie so that someone will lend me money, because I am in need." Kant argues that universalizing this maxim would lead to a contradiction — that is, if everyone were to follow this maxim, and were to lie whenever in need, promises would mean nothing. So it would be contradictory or irrational in the possible world to make a false promise to secure money, since your promise would simply be laughed at. Thus, acting on such a maxim in the real world is impermissible, which means we have a duty not to make false promises just to satisfy our needs. Incidentally, Kant believed that any maxim involving lying would lead to a contradiction, leading to his commitment to the view that we have a perfect (i.e. inviolable) duty not to lie.The second type of contradiction Kant calls "contradictions in will," which arise when a universalized maxim would contradict something the agent would have to will as a rational being. Kant's example involves a self-reliant person who thinks everybody should mind their own business, and thus acts on the maxim: "Don't help others." In the imagined world where this is universalized, Kant thinks that this would necessarily contradict something any rational agent must will, namely that if one is in great need and could easily be helped by another, as a rational being he would have to will that the other person help him — but this universalized maxim contradicts that, thus leading to a contradiction in will, and showing that the policy, "Don't help others" is impermissible.Example of the second formulation:If I steal a book from you, I am treating you as a means only (to obtain a book). If I ask to have your book, I am respecting your right to say no, and am thereby treating you as an end-in-yourself, not as a means to an end. However, if I only ask you to be perceived by you as a nice person and to induce you to do things for me in the future, then again I am treating you as a means only.Kant applied his categorical imperative to the issue of suicide in Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, writing that:If a man is reduced to despair by a series of misfortunes and feels wearied of life, but is still so far in possession of his reason that he can ask himself whether it would not be contrary to his duty to himself to take his own life, he should ask himself a question. He should inquire whether the maxim of his action could become a universal law of nature. His maxim is: From self-love I adopt it as a principle to shorten my life when its longer duration is likely to bring more evil than satisfaction. It is asked then simply whether this principle founded on self-love can become a universal law of nature. Now we see at once that a system of nature of which it should be a law to destroy life by means of the very feeling whose special nature it is to impel to the improvement of life would contradict itself, and therefore could not exist as a system of nature; hence the maxim cannot possibly exist as a universal law of nature, and consequently would be wholly inconsistent with the supreme principle of all duty.The theory that we have universal duties, which hold despite one's own inclinations or the desire to pursue one's own happiness instead, is known as deontological ethics. Kant is often cited as the most important source of this strand of ethical theory; in particular, of the theory of conduct, also known as the theory of obligation. Kant's approach on The Critique of Pure ReasonThe Critique of Pure Reason is an attempt to answer two questions: "What do we know?" and "How do we know it?".Kant approaches the questions by looking at the relationship between knowledge based on reason (what we know purely logically, prior to or independently of experience, or a priori) and knowledge based on experience (what we know based on the input of our senses or a posteriori).In Kant's view, a priori intuitions and concepts provide us with some a priori knowledge, which also provides the framework for our a posterioriknowledge. For example, Kant argues that space and time are not part of what we might regard as objective reality, but are part of the apparatus of perception, and causality is a conceptual organizing principle that we impose upon nature.In other words, space and time are a form of seeing and causality is a form of knowing. Both space and time and our conceptual principles and processes pre-structure our experience.When we see a box as three-dimensional, the shape of the box may not be part of the box's nature. Kant argues that the spatio-temporal aspect of our perception of the shape of the box comes from us, in interaction with the box, not just from the box itself. When we experience events as causing other events, it is because we have a concept of causality in nature into which we fit our experience.Things as they are "in themselves" are unknowable. For something to become an object of knowledge, it must be experienced, and experience is prestructured by the activity of our own minds -- both space and time as the forms of our intuition or perception, and the unifying, structuring activity of our concepts. These two aspects of our minds turn things-in-themselves into the world of our experience. We are never passive observers or knowers.Kant's I—the Transcendental Unity of Apperception—is similarly unknowable. I am aware that there is an "I", subject, or self that accompanies all of my experience and consciousness. But since I only experience it in time, which is a "subjective" form of perception, I can never know directly that "I" that is appearing in time as it might be "in itself", outside of time. Thus we can never truly know ourselves as we might be outside of or prior to the forms through which we perceive and conceive ourselves.Transcendental AestheticKant separates the mind into two faculties, intuition and understanding. The Transcendental Aesthetic is that part of the CPR that considers the contribution of intuition to our knowledge or cognition. In discussing intuition Kant says: "In whatever manner and by whatever means a mode of knowledge may relate to objects, intution is that through which it is in immediate relation to them" (A19/B33). Intuition is responsible for providing the mind with objects, or what Kant calls "appearances". Kant then goes on to distinguish between the matter and the form of appearances. The matter is "that in the appearance which corresponds to sensation" (A20/B34). The form is "that which so determines the manifold of appearance that it allows of being ordered in certain relations" (A20/B34). Kant's revolutionary claim is that the form of appearances — which he later identifies as space and time — is a contribution made by the faculty of intuition to cognition, rather than something that exists independently of the mind. This is Kant's doctrine that space and time are transcendentally ideal.Kant's arguments for this conclusion are widely debated amongst Kant scholars. Some see the argument as based on Kant's conclusions that our representation of space and time is an a priori intuition. From here Kant is thought to argue that our representation of space and time as a priori intuitions entails that space and time are transcendentally ideal (see Henry Allison, "Kant's Transcendental Idealism"). Others see the argument as based upon the question of whether synthetic a priori judgments are possible. Kant is taken to argue that the only way synthetic a priori judgments, such as those made in geometry, are possible is if space is transcendentally ideal.Transcendental LogicThe Transcendental Logic is that part of the CPR where Kant investigates the understanding and its role in constituting our knowledge. The understanding is defined as the faculty of the mind which deals with concepts (A51-52/B75-76). The Logic is divided into two parts: the Analytic and the Dialectic. In the Analytic Kant investigates the contributions of the understanding to knowledge. In the Dialectic Kant investigates the limits of the understanding.The idea of a transcendental logic is that of a logic which gives an account of the origins of our knowledge as well as its relationship to objects. This is contrasted by Kant with the idea of a general logic, which abstracts from the conditions under which our knowledge is acquired, and from any relation that knowledge has to objects.Transcendental AnalyticThe Transcendental Analytic is divided into an Analytic of Concepts and an Analytic of Principles, as well as a third section concerned with the distinction between phenomena and noumena. The main sections of the Analytic of Concepts are The Metaphysical Deduction and the Transcendental Deduction of the Categories. The main sections of the Analytic of Principles are the Schematism, Axioms of Intuition, Anticipations of Perception, Analogies of Experience, Postulates and The Refutation of Idealism.The Metaphysical DeductionIn the Metaphysical Deduction Kant aims to derive the pure concepts of the understanding (what he also calls "categories") from the logical forms of judgment. In the Metaphysical Deduction Kant introduces his table of judgments which he uses to guide the derivation of the table of categories.The Transcendental DeductionIn the Transcendental Deduction Kant aims to show that the categories are applicable to the objects of experience which are given to us through intuition. Kant rewrote the entire Transcendental Deduction for the second edition of the Critique, published 6 years after the first edition.The Refutation of IdealismIn order to answer criticisms of the Critique of Pure Reason that Transcendental Idealism denied the reality of external objects, Kant added a section to the second edition (1787) entitled "The Refutation of Idealism" that turns the "game" of idealism against itself by arguing that self-consciousness presupposes external objects in space. Defining self-consciousness as a determination of the self in time, Kant argues that all determinations of time presuppose something permanent in perception and that this permanent cannot be in the self, since it is only through the permanent that one's existence in time can itself be determined. This argument inverted the supposed priority of inner over outer experience that had dominated philosophies of mind and knowledge since Descartes. 

Friedrich Wilhelm Heinrich Alexander Freiherr von Humboldt (September 14, 1769 – May 6, 1859) was a German naturalist and explorer, and the younger brother of the Prussian minister, philosopher, and linguist, Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767-1835). Humboldt's quantitative work on botanical geography was foundational to the field of biogeography.DiedMay 6, 1859 (aged89) BerlinNationalityGermanFieldsnaturalistKnown forbiogeography,Kosmos (1845)Between 1799 and 1804, Humboldt traveled extensively in Latin America, exploring and describing it for the first time in a manner generally considered to be a modern scientific point of view. His description of the journey was written up and published in an enormous set of volumes over 21 years.

He was one of the first to propose that the lands bordering the Atlantic Ocean were once joined (South America and Africa in particular). Later, his five-volume work, Kosmos (1845), attempted to unify the various branches of scientific knowledge. Humboldt supported and worked with other scientists, including Joseph-Louis Gay-Lussac, Justus von Liebig, Louis Agassiz, Matthew Fontaine Maury, and most notably, Aimé Bonpland, with whom he conducted much of his scientific exploration.

Berlin University, 1950.

The first two volumes of the Kosmos were published between the years 1845 and 1847. Humboldt had been intending to write a comprehensive work about different facets of geography and the natural sciences for decades. The writing first took shape in a set of lectures he delivered before the University of Berlin in the winter of 1827-28. In the words of one biography, these lectures would form "the cartoon for the great fresco of the [K]osmos".The scope of this work may be described as the representation of the unity amidst the complexity of nature. Humboldt's work was by and large a synthesis of Kantian views of unity of natural phenomena. Drawing together the methods and instrumentation of the discrete sciences and with inspiration fromGerman Romanticism, Humboldt sought to create a compendium of the world's environment. The book was written for an educated audience and contains much contemporaneous scientific data.

The last decade of his long life — his "improbable" years, as he was accustomed to calling them — was devoted to the continuation of this work, of which the third and fourth volumes were published in 1850-58, while a fragment of a fifth was to appear posthumously in 1862. In these volumes he sought to elaborate upon the individual branches of science broadly surveyed in the first volume. Notwithstanding their high separate value, it must be admitted that, from an artistic point of view, these additions were deformities. The characteristic idea of the work, so far as such a gigantic idea admitted of literary incorporation, was completely developed in its opening portions, and the attempt to convert it into a scientific encyclopædia was in truth to nullify its generating motive. Humboldt's remarkable industry and accuracy were never more conspicuous than in this latest trophy to his genius. Nor did he rely entirely on his own labours. He owed much of what he accomplished to his rare power of assimilating thoughts that were not as his own and availing himself of others' cooperation. The notes to Kosmos overflow with laudatory citations, the current coin in which he discharged his intellectual debts.

Kosmos was very popular, especially in Britain and USA. In 1849 a German newspaper mused about the fact that in England two of the three different translations(!) of this work were made by women, "while in Germany most of the men do not understand it."[7] The first had been made by Augustin Pritchard and published anonymous by Mr. Baillière, volume I in 1845 and volume II in 1848. But it suffered very much from the hurry it was made in. Humboldt wrote in a letter on this translation. "It will damage my reputation. All the charm of my description is destroyed by an English sounding like Sanskrit." The other two translations were made by Mrs. Sabine under the superintendence of her Husband Col. Edward Sabine (4 volumes 1846 – 1858), and by Miss E.C. Otté (5 volumes 1849 – 1858, the only complete translation of the 4 German volumes). These three translations were also published in USA. The numbering of the volumes differ between the German and the English editions. Volume 3 of the German edition corresponds to the volumes 3 and 4 of the English translation, as the German volume appeared in 2 parts in 1850 and 1851. Volume 5 of the German edition was not translated until 1981, again by a woman.[8] A great advantage of the English translation of Miss Otté was its detailed table of contents, and index for every volume; of the German edition only volumes 4 and 5 had an extremely short table of contents. German readers had to wait until the appearance of volume 5 in 1862 for an index.Not so well known in Germany is the atlas belonging to the German edition of the Cosmos "Berghaus’ Physikalischer Atlas", better known as the pirated version by Traugott Bromme under the title "Atlas zu Alexander von Humboldt’s Kosmos" (Stuttgart 1861). In Britain Heinrich Berghaus planned to publish together with Alexander Keith Johnston a "Physical Atlas". But later Johnston published it alone under the title"The Physical Atlas of Natural Phenomena". In Britain its connection to the Cosmos seems not have been recognized.[9][edit]Illness and deathOn February 24, 1857 Humboldt suffered a minor stroke, which passed without perceptible symptoms. It was not until the winter of 1858-1859 that his strength began to decline, and that spring, on May 6, he died quietly in Berlin at the age of 89. The honours which had been showered on him during life continued after his death. His remains, prior to being interred in the family resting-place at Tegel, were conveyed in state through the streets of Berlin, and received by the prince-regent at the door of the cathedral. The first centenary of his birth was celebrated on September 14, 1869, with great enthusiasm in both the New and Old Worlds. Numerous monuments erected in his honour, and newly explored regions named after Humboldt, bear witness to his wide fame and popularity.

Not so well known in Germany is the atlas belonging to the German edition of the Cosmos "Berghaus’ Physikalischer Atlas", better known as the pirated version by Traugott Bromme under the title "Atlas zu Alexander von Humboldt’s Kosmos" (Stuttgart 1861). In Britain Heinrich Berghaus planned to publish together with Alexander Keith Johnston a "Physical Atlas". But later Johnston published it alone under the title"The Physical Atlas of Natural Phenomena". In Britain its connection to the Cosmos seems not have been recognized.Illness and deathOn February 24, 1857 Humboldt suffered a minor stroke, which passed without perceptible symptoms. It was not until the winter of 1858-1859 that his strength began to decline, and that spring, on May 6, he died quietly in Berlin at the age of 89. The honours which had been showered on him during life continued after his death. His remains, prior to being interred in the family resting-place at Tegel, were conveyed in state through the streets of Berlin, and received by the prince-regent at the door of the cathedral. The first centenary of his birth was celebrated on September 14, 1869, with great enthusiasm in both the New and Old Worlds. Numerous monuments erected in his honour, and newly explored regions named after Humboldt, bear witness to his wide fame and popularity.

The Schnepfenthal Institution (Salzmannschule Schnepfenthal) is a school founded in 1784 by Christian Gotthilf Salzmann, originally for the purpose of raising the children of his large family and testing new educational theories.

KARL RITTER (1779-1859), was born at Quedlinburg on the 7th of August 1779, and died in Berlin on the 28th of September 1859. His father, a physician, left his family in straitened circumstances, and Karl was received into the Schnepfenthal institution then just founded by Christian Gotthilf Salzmann (1744-1811) for the purpose of testing his educational theories. The Salzmann system was practically that of Rousseau; conformity to natural law and enlightenment were its watchwords; great attention was given to practical life; and the modern languages were carefully taught, to the complete exclusion of Latin and Greek.

University of Halle in 1836

Ritter already showed geographical aptitude, and when his schooldays were drawing to a close his future course was determined by an introduction to Bethmann Hollweg, a banker in Frankfort. It was arranged that Ritter should become tutor to Hollweg's children, but that in the meantime he should attend the university at his patron's expense. His duties as tutor in the Hollweg family began at Frankfort in 1798 and continued for fifteen years. The years 1814-19, which he spent at Gottingen in order still to watch over the welfare of his pupils, were those in which he began to devote himself exclusively to geographical inquiries. He had already travelled extensively in Europe when in 1817-18 he brought out his first masterpiece, Die Erdkunde im Verhdltnis zur Natur and zur Geschichte des Menschen (Berlin, 2 vols., 1817-1818).

Ritter received an excellent education in the natural sciences and was well versed in history and theology. Guided by the educational principles of the famed Swiss teacher Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi and by the ideas of the German philosopher-theologian Johann Gottfried von Herder on the relation between man and his environment, Ritter became a teacher and philosopher in the field of geography, serving as professor at the University of Berlin from 1820 until the end of his life.

Viewing geography as an empirical science, he maintained that its methodology required proceeding from one observation to the next, not from opinion or hypothesis to observation. Though he was convinced that there were laws of geography, he appeared to attach no particular importance to establishing them clearly.

He stressed, instead, the importance of utilizing all the sciences to delineate the nature of geography, which was, in his view, unique.Ritter always regarded Humboldt, who was ten years his senior, as his master and partly based his geographical writings on Humboldt's ideas. He was frequently more a historian than a geographer and wrote what has come to be known as a geographical interpretation of history. The opposition to his ideas that developed after his death arose in part from the contention that he had made geography ancillary to history. Even so, during his later life and for nearly 20 years following his death, his ideas deeply influenced geographical research in Germany.

His great work, Die Erdkunde was never completed. The first volume, on Africa, was published in 1817 and brought him his appointment at the University of Berlin; a revised edition appeared in 1822. Between 1832 and his death he regularly published new volumes, chiefly on Asia. The work, though incomplete, ran to 20,000 pages in 19 volumes.