Natural Philosophy 193as Cameralwissenschaft, after the camera, or meeting room, in which mat-
ters of state were discussed, had a place in German universities and special
higher schools from the middle of the eighteenth century and, in iso-
lated cases, even earlier. This science collected information about a state’s
agriculture, commerce, industry, population, territory, history, laws, and
customs to serve as a basis for economic policy.
The seat of Cameralwissenschaft was the University of Göttingen. Its
leading representative there from 1769 to 1809, A. L. Schlözer, had re-
sponsibility for the newly instituted subject of universal history. “Uni-
versal” signifi ed not only everywhere but also everything: in contrast to
the usual preoccupations of historians, which centered on religious, legal,
and political history, Schlözer emphasized economic, demographic, and
cultural aspects, that is, the material of statistics. For him statistics con-
stituted history; in a famous aphorism set down in 1793, he declared,
“history is statistics in motion, statistics history at rest.” The Cameral-
wissenschaftler described the condition of the world at a chosen instant,
the historian explained the change of the world condition in time. Sta-
tistics not only made the core of the work of the historian, the prince,
and the bureaucrat, but also guaranteed the liberty of people governed by
rulers so informed. Schlözer was a man of the Enlightenment. He believed
that where free inquiry reigned, despotism could not enter.^50
Universal history had close ties to natural philosophy at Göttingen.
Schlözer’s colleague in the history of everything, J. C. Gatterer, made con-
tributions to meteorology. Schlözer himself took natural history as his
model when he elaborated his idea of universal history. Whenever pos-
sible, the statistics that made history were to be quantifi ed. Consequently,
the coverage of statistics tended to be restricted to quantifi able aspects of
life and Cameralwissenschaft to fall among the quantitative sciences of
the late eighteenth century. Like exact natural philosophy, it earned the
disgust of critics inspired by the Romantic movement, whose sensitivities
were outraged by the reduction of individuals of different moral worth to
normalizing calculations.^51
The most successful and demanding of the subjects within Cameral-
wissenschaft was forestry. The Seven Years’ War damaged many a forest
from which princelings and large landholders had derived a principal part
of their income. Earlier methods of forest management, which scarcely
went beyond an estimate of the number of standing trees, gave way to
plans for sustained yields drawn up by men with knowledge of sylvicul-
ture, economics, surveying, and practical mathematics.^52 As in agricul-
ture, so in forestry, the increase in sustainable yields of lands managed
scientifi cally—that is, in accordance with rationalized experience and