sais," takes to himself no small credit for liberality in so doing, and hopes, by rendering equal justice to Leibnitz and to Locke, to conciliate those "who, with the former, think that their wisdom is the sure measure of omnipotence,"[1] and those who "believe, with the latter, that the human mind is to the rays of the primal Truth what a night-bird is to the sun."[2]
Voltaire pronounced him "le savant le plus universel de l'Europe," but characterized his metaphysical labors with the somewhat equivocal compliment of "metaphysicien assez délié pour vouloir réconcilier la théologie avec la métaphysique."[3]
Germany, with all her wealth of erudite celebrities, has produced no other who fulfils so completely the type of the Gelehrte,—a type which differs from that of the savant and from that of the scholar, but includes them both. Feuerbach calls him "the personified thirst for Knowledge"; Frederic the Great pronounced him an "Academy of Sciences"; and Fontenelle said of him, that "he saw the end of things, or that they had no end." It was an age of intellectual adventure into which Leibnitz was born,—fit sequel and heir to the age of maritime adventure which preceded it. We please ourselves with fancied analogies between the two epochs and the nature of their discoveries. In the latter movement, as in the former, Italy took the lead. The martyr Giordano Bruno was the brave Columbus of modern thought,—the first who broke loose from the trammels of mediaeval ecclesiastical tradition, and reported a new world beyond the watery waste of scholasticism. Campanella may represent the Vespucci of the new enterprise; Lord Bacon its Sebastian Cabot,—the "Novum Organum" being the Newfoundland of modern experimental science. Des Cartes was the Cortés, or shall we rather say the Ponce de Leon, of scientific discovery, who, failing to find what he sought,—the Principle of Life, (the Fountain of Eternal Youth,)—yet found enough to render his name immortal and to make mankind his debtor. Spinoza is the spiritual Magalhaens, who, emerging from the straits of Judaism, beheld
"Another ocean's breast immense, unknown."
Of modern thinkers he was
———"the first
That ever burst
Into that silent sea."
He discovered the Pacific of philosophy,—that theory of the sole Divine Substance, the All-One, which Goethe in early life found so pacifying to his troubled spirit, and which, vague and barren as it proves on nearer acquaintance, induces at first, above all other systems, a sense of repose in illimitable vastness and immutable necessity.
But the Vasco de Gama of his day was Leibnitz. His triumphant optimism rounded the Cape of theological Good Hope. He gave the chief impulse to modern intellectual commerce. Full freighted, as he was, with Western thought, he revived the forgotten interest in the Old and Eastern World, and brought the ends of the earth together. Circumnavigator of the realms of mind, wherever he touched, he appeared as discoverer, as conqueror, as lawgiver. In mathematics, he discovered or invented the Differential Calculus,—the logic of transcendental analysis, the infallible method of astronomy, without which it could never have compassed the large conclusions of the "Mecanique Celeste." In his "Protogaea," published in 1693, he laid the foundation of the science of Geology. From his observations, as Superintendent of the Hartz Mines, and those which he made in his subsequent travels through Austria and Italy,—from an
- ↑ "Stimai già che 'I mio saper misura
Certa fosse e infallibile di quanto
Può far l'alto Fattor della natura."Tasso, Gerus, xiv. 45. - ↑ "Augel notturno al sole
E nostra mente a' rai del primo Vero."Ib. 46. - ↑ "On sait que Voltaire n'aimait pas Leibnitz. J'imagine que c'est le chrétien qu'il détestait en lui."—Ch. Waddington.
