Every mind, even the greatest, is a product of its time and place. The true visionaries are those unwilling to mistake the figments of their culture for facts; those daring enough to look at the world not through the microscope that magnifies the concerns of the present, not through the telescope that squints at the distant reaches of the future, but through a periscope that rises above the surface of the mainstream to see past the horizon of the era’s givens, into the possibilities of times to come.

As a young man raised in a deeply religious era, homeschooled by his strict pastor father, George Forster (November 27, 1754–January 10, 1794) would write to his youngest sister that happiness is only to be found through proximity with God, that God is “boundless love that transcends all other love.” Over the course of his short and periscopic life, he would come to see that God is just another word for nature; he would come to see that nature in all its “active living power” as a “magic net of countless threads joined by countless knots, where each thing is connected to all and all to each” — the ultimate “system of divine concordance.”

By seeing the profound interleaving of life, he would also see the dangerous delusion of our artificial divisions — between the races and the sexes, between the body and the mind, between the observer and the observed. He would incubate these ideas — radical now, nothing less than revolutionary then — as a young unknown naturalist on James Cook’s voyages into the South Seas and would go on to seed them in the most fertile scientific mind of his epoch. “I have spent half a century, wherever a restless, eventful life has taken me,” Alexander von Humboldt would reflect at the end of his long and far-reaching life, ” telling myself and others what I owe to my teacher and friend Georg Forster.”

Andrea Wulf animates the life of this forgotten visionary in The Traveler: One Man’s Quest for Humanity from the South Seas to Revolutionary Paris (public library) — one of those rare books in which a single life, rendered with rigor and compassion in all its delicate particularity, becomes a lens for the best in human nature: our passion for the possible, our stubborn refusal to resign ourselves to the system, our bottomless capacity for kindness.

Nowhere was Forster more visionary, more ahead of his time and still ahead of ours, than in his defiance of Descartes, refusing to reduce intelligence to the workings of the rational mind, refusing to reduce wonder to a calculation. His long-ago lamentation rattles the bones of the modern mind still haunted by the Cartesian delusion that intelligence is a thing only of the mind:

Never before has there been a greater danger of elevating cold reason into a universally worshipped idol at the expense of feeling.

Wulf shades in the subtleties of his radicalism:

George Forster observed with both his mind and his heart, determined to “banish all rash hypotheses back into their small closet.” The emphasis he placed on feeling rather than reason and objectivity stood in contrast to many (but not all) Enlightenment thinkers who valued rational enquiry, repeatable experiments and empirical observation over emotions and subjectivity… He dismissed what he called the reliance on reason alone — these “aberrations of the mind.” He believed that “in the sharply defined forms of abstraction, all that is good, noble and great… is irretrievably lost.”

Forster yearned to know the inner life of nature, which is the crux of all science, but he came to know it with more than the mind. He moved through the world with the virtuosic noticing of a poet, opening his full creaturely sensorium to the breadth of wonder between the wildflowers and the stars. An epoch before quantum mechanics implicated the observer in the observed, bending the central dogma of science and its dream of objectivity, before philosopher Martha Nussbaum insisted that “emotions are not just the fuel that powers the psychological mechanism of a reasoning creature [but] parts, highly complex and messy parts, of this creature’s reasoning itself,” George Forster implicated himself, a reasoning creature of feeling, in the discoveries he recounted in A Voyage Round the World — his unprecedented rendering of nature not as a series of discreet portraits of particular features framed by particular disciplines but as a vast panorama of processes and phenomena inseparable from one another and from our participancy in them: humus and history, climate and culture.

Wulf writes:

George believed that you had to see the world in order to understand it. There was no point in trying to make sense of everything in your study, he explained, “because in the end, one has nothing else than what comes through these two small openings in your eyes and sets the vibrations of the brain in motion!” Individual experience was indispensable. “Two travellers,” he wrote, “seldom saw the same object in the same manner, and each reported the fact differently, according to his sensations, and his peculiar mode of thinking.” … Unlike most of his contemporaries, George believed that reason alone was not enough to understand the world. That didn’t mean that he diminished the value of observation, but he had no interest in simply collecting data — being “a mere compiler… that I cannot do.” Those thinkers who worshipped cold evidence alone “had their wish; facts were collected in all parts of the world, and yet knowledge was not increased.” Years later he would explain that “the first point from which all knowledge is gained is based on Empfindung” — a German term that can be translated as “sensations,” though it is more nuanced as it not only refers to the physical senses but also implies a capacity to feel and an awareness of a subjective experience of the world.

Emanating from his visionary book was the fundamental feature of his visionary life: his love of nature and his love of humanity, entwined beyond separation — a living testament to the single answer pulsating beneath all of our questions. Forster’s own exuberant words reveal a thinker unafraid to feel, a mind lucid enough to know that love is our highest form of knowledge:

I thank God that there is such a delicious thing as human love in this world; it lifts us up; it chains us to each other, no matter how distant we are; it is the most comforting, happiest feeling in the world!