The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858

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Then thoughts of the past come crowding fast
On a blissful track of love and sighs;--
Oh, well I toiled, and these poor hands soiled,
That her song might bloom in Italian skies!--
The pains and fears of those lonely years,
The nights of longing and hope and tears,--
Her heart's sweet debt, and the long arrears
Of love in those faithful eyes!

O night! be friendly to her and me!--
To box and pit and gallery swarm
The expectant throngs;--I am there to see;--
And now she is bending her radiant form
To the clapping crowd;--I am thrilled and proud;
My dim eyes look through a misty cloud,
And my joy mounts up on the plaudits loud,
Like a sea-bird on a storm!

She has waved her hand; the noisy rush
Of applause sinks down; and silverly
Her voice glides forth on the quivering hush,
Like the white-robed moon on a tremulous sea!
And wherever her shining influence calls,
I swing on the billow that swells and falls,--
I know no more,--till the very walls
Seem shouting with jubilee!

Oh, little she cares for the fop who airs
His glove and glass, or the gay array
Of fans and perfumes, of jewels and plumes,
Where wealth and pleasure have met to pay
Their nightly homage to her sweet song;
But over the bravas clear and strong,
Over all the flaunting and fluttering throng,
She smiles my soul away!

Why am I happy? why am I proud?
Oh, can it be true she is all my own?--
I make my way through the ignorant crowd;
I know, I know where my love hath flown.
Again we meet; I am here at her feet,
And with kindling kisses and promises sweet,
Her glowing, victorious lips repeat
That they sing for me alone!

GOTTFRIED WILHELM VON LEIBNITZ.

The philosophic import of this illustrious name, having suffered
temporary eclipse from the Critical Philosophy, with its swift
succession of transcendental dynasties,--the _Wissenschaftslehre_,
the _Naturphilosophie_, and the _Encyclopaedie_,--has recently
emerged into clear and respectful recognition, if not into broad and
effulgent repute. In divers quarters, of late, the attention of the
learned has reverted to the splendid optimist, whose adventurous
intellect left nothing unexplored and almost nothing unexplained.
Biographers and critics have discussed his theories,--some in the
interest of philosophy, and some in the interest of religion,--some
in the spirit of discipleship, and some in the spirit of opposition,--
but all with consenting and admiring attestation of the vast
erudition and intellectual prowess and unsurpassed capacity [1]
of the man.

[Footnote 1: The author of a notice of Leibnitz, more clever than
profound, in four numbers of the _Gentleman's Magazine_ for 1852,
distinguishes between capacity and faculty. He gives his subject
credit for the former, but denies his claim to the latter of these
attributes. As if any manifestation of mind were more deserving of
that title than the power of intellectual concentration, to which
nothing that came within its focus was insoluble.]

A collection of all the works appertaining to Leibnitz, with all his
own writings, would make a respectable library. We have no room for
the titles of all, even of the more recent of these publications. We
content ourselves with naming the Biography, by G. G. Guhrauer, the
best that has yet appeared, called forth by the celebration, in 1846,
of the ducentesimal birthday of Leibnitz,--the latest edition of his
Philosophical Works, by Professor Erdmann of Halle--the publication
of his Correspondence with Arnauld, by Herr Grotefend, and of that
with the Landgrave Ernst von Hessen Rheinfels, by Chr. von Rommel,--
of his Historical Works, by the librarian Pertz of Berlin,--of the
Mathematical, by Gerhardt,--Ludwig Jeuerbach's elaborate dissertation,
"Darstellung, Entwickelung und Kritik der Leibnitzischen Philosophie,"--
Zimmermann's "Leibnitz u. Herbart's Monadologie,"--Schelling's
"Leibnitz als Denker,"--Hartenstein's "De Materiae apud Leibnit.
Notione,"--and Adolph Helferich's "Spinoza u. Leibnitz: oder Das
Wesen des Idealismus u. des Realismus." To these we must add, as
one of the most valuable contributions to Leibnitian literature,
M. Foucher de Careil's recent publication of certain MSS. of Leibnitz,
found in the library at Hanover, containing strictures on Spinoza,
(which the editor takes the liberty to call "Refutation Inedite de
Spinoza,")--"Sentiment de Worcester et de Locke sur les Idees,"--
"Correspondance avec Foucher, Bayle et Fontenelle,"--"Reflexions sur
l'Art de connaitre les Homines,"--"Fragmens Divers," etc. [2],
accompanied by valuable introductory and critical essays.

[Footnote 2: A second collection, by the same hand, appeared in 1857,
with the title, _Nouvelles Lettres et Opuscules Inedits de Leibnitz_.
Precedes d'une Introduction. Par A. Foucher de Careil. Paris. 1857.]

M. de Careil complains that France has done so little for the memory
of a man "qui lui a fait l'honneur d'ecrire les deux tiers de ses
oeuvres en Francais." England does not owe him the same obligations,
and England has done far less than France,--in fact, nothing to
illustrate the memory of Leibnitz; not so much as an English
translation of his works, or an English edition of them, in these
two centuries. Nor have M. de Careil's countrymen in times past
shared all his enthusiasm for the genial Saxon. The barren
Psychology of Locke obtained a currency in France, in the last
century, which the friendly Realism of his great contemporary could
never boast. Raspe, the first who edited the "Nouveaux Essais,"
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," [3] 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." [4]

[Footnote 3:
"Stimai gia che 'I mio saper misura
Certa fosse e infallibile di quanto
Puo far l'alto Fattor della natura."
Tasso, _Gerus_, xiv. 45.]

[Footnote 4:
"Augel notturno al sole
E nostra mente a' rai del primo Vero."
_Ib_. 46.]

Voltaire pronounced him "le savant le plus universel de l'Europe,"
but characterized his metaphysical labors with the somewhat
equivocal compliment of "metaphysicien assez delie pour vouloir
reconcilier la theologie avec la metaphysique." [5]

[Footnote 5: "On sait que Voltaire n'aimait pas Leibnitz.
J'imagine que c'est le chretien qu'il detestait en lui."
--Ch. Waddington.]

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 Cortes, 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 examination
of the layers, in different localities, of the earth's crust, he
deduced the first theory, in the geological sense, which has ever
been propounded, of the earth's formation. Orthodox Lutheran as he
was, he braved the theological prejudices which then, even more than
now, affronted scientific inquiry in that direction. "First among men,"
says Flourens, "he demonstrated the two agencies which successively
have formed and reformed the globe,--fire and water." In the region
of metaphysical inquiry, he propounded a new and original theory of
Substance, and gave to philosophy the Monad, the Law of Continuity,
the Preestablished Harmony, and the Best Possible World.

Born at Leipzig, in 1646,--left fatherless at the age of six years,--
by the care of a pious mother and competent guardians, young
Leibnitz enjoyed such means of education as Germany afforded at that
time, but declares himself, for the most part, self-taught [6].

[Footnote 6: "Duo, ihi profuere mirifice, (quae tamen alioqui ambigna,
et pluribus noxia esse solent,) primum quod fere essem [Greek:
autodidaktos], alterum quod quaererem nova in unaquaque scientia."
--LEIBNIT. _Opera Philosoph_. Erdmann. p. 162.]

So genius must always be, for want of any external stimulus equal to
its own impulse. No normal training could keep pace with his
abnormal growth. No school discipline could supply the fuel
necessary to feed the consuming fire of that ravenous intellect.
Grammars, manuals, compends,--all the apparatus of the classes,--
were only oil to its flame. The Master of the Nicolai-Schule in
Leipzig, his first instructor, was a steady practitioner of the
Martinet order. The pupils were ranged in classes corresponding to
their civil ages,--their studies graduated according to the
baptismal register. It was not a question of faculty or proficiency,
how a lad should be classed and what he should read, but of calendar
years. As if a shoemaker should fit his last to the age instead of
the foot. Such an age, such a study. Gottfried is a genius, and Hans
is a dunce; but Gottfried and Hans were both born in 1646;
consequently, now, in 1654, they are both equally fit for the
Smaller Catechism. Leibnitz was ready for Latin long before the time
allotted to that study in the Nicolai-Schule, but the system was
inexorable. All access to books cut off by rigorous proscription.
But the thirst for knowledge is not easily stifled, and genius, like
love, "will find out his way."

He chanced, in a corner of the house, to light on an odd volume of
Livy, left there by some student boarder. What could Livy do for a
child of eight years, with no previous knowledge of Latin, and no
lexicon to interpret between them? For most children, nothing. Not
one in a thousand would have dreamed of seriously grappling with
such a mystery. But the brave Patavinian took pity on our little one
and yielded something to childish importunity. The quaint old copy
was garnished, according to a fashion of the time, with rude
wood-cuts, having explanatory legends underneath. The young
philologer tugged at these until he had mastered one or two words.
Then the book was thrown by in despair as impracticable to further
investigation. Then, after one or two weeks had elapsed, for want of
other employment, it was taken up again, and a little more progress
made. And so by degrees, in the course of a year, a considerable
knowledge of Latin had been achieved. But when, in the Nicolai order,
the time for this study arrived, so far from being pleased to find
his instructions anticipated, or welcoming such promise of future
greatness,--so far from rejoicing in his pupil's proficiency, the
pedagogue chafed at the insult offered to his system by this empiric
antepast. He was like one who suddenly discovers that he is telling
an old story where he thought to surprise with a novelty; or like
one who undertakes to fill a lamp, which, being (unknown to him)
already full, runs over, and his oil is spilled. It was "oleum
perdidit" in another sense than the scholastic one. Complaint was
made to the guardians of the orphan Gottfried of these illicit
visits to the tree of knowledge. Severe prohibitory measures were
recommended, which, however, judicious counsel from another quarter
happily averted.

At the age of eleven, Leibnitz records, that he made, on one occasion,
three hundred Latin verses without elision between breakfast and
dinner. A hundred hexameters, or fifty distichs, in a day, is
generally considered a fair _pensum_ for a boy of sixteen at a
German gymnasium.

At the age of seventeen, he produced, as an academic exercise, on
taking the degree of Bachelor of Philosophy, his celebrated treatise
on the Principle of Individuality, "De Principle Individui," the
most extraordinary performance ever achieved by a youth of that age,--
remarkable for its erudition, especially its intimate knowledge of
the writings of the Schoolmen, and equally remarkable for its
vigorous grasp of thought and its subtile analysis. In this essay
Leibnitz discovered the bent of his mind and prefigured his future
philosophy, in the choice of his theme, and in his vivid appreciation
and strenuous positing of the individual as the fundamental
principle of ontology. He takes Nominalistic ground in relation to
the old controversy of Nominalist and Realist, siding with Abelard
and Roscellin and Occam, and against St. Thomas and Duns Scotus. The
principle of individuation, he maintains, is the entire entity of
the individual, and not mere limitation of the universal, whether by
"Existence" or by "_Haecceity_." [7] John and Thomas are individuals
by virtue of their integral humanity, and not by fractional limitation
of humanity. Dobbin is an actual positive horse (_Entitas tota_).
Not a negation, by limitation, of universal equiety (_Negatio_).
Not an individuation, by actual existence, of a non-existent but
essential and universal horse (_Existentia_). Nor yet a horse
only by limitation of kind,--a horse minus Dick and Bessie and the
brown mare, etc. (_Haecceitas_). But an individual horse,
simply by virtue of his equine nature. Only so far as he is an actual
complete horse, is he an individual at all. (_Per quod quid est,
per id unum numero est_.) His individuality is nothing superadded
to his equiety. (_Unum supra ens nihil addit reale_.) Neither
is it anything subtracted therefrom. (_Negatio non potest producere
accidentia individualia_.) In fine, there is and can be no horse
but actual individual horses. (_Essentia et existentia non possunt
separari_.)

[Footnote 7: "Aut enim principium individuationis ponitur _entitas
tota_, (1) aut non tota. Non totam aut negatio exprimit, (2) aut
aliquid positivum. Positivum aut pars physica est, essentiam
terminaus, _existentia_, (3) aut metaphysica, speciem terminans,
_haec ceitas_. (4)... Pono igitur: omne individuum sua tota
entitate individuatur."
--_De Princ. Indiv_. 3 et 4.]

This was the doctrine of the Nominalists, as it was of Aristotle
before them. It was the doctrine of the Reformers, except, if we
remember rightly, of Huss. The University of Leipzig was founded
upon it. It is the current doctrine of the present day, and
harmonizes well with the current Materialism. Not that Nominalism in
itself, and as Leibnitz held it, is necessarily materialistic, but
Realism is essentially antimaterialistic. The Realists held with
Plato,--but not in his name, for they, too, claimed to be
Aristotelian, and preeminently so,--that the ideal must precede the
actual. So far they were right. This was their strong point. Their
error lay in claiming for the ideal an objective reality, an
independent being. Conceptualism was only another statement of
Nominalism, or, at most, a question of the relation of language to
thought. It cannot be regarded as a third issue in this controversy,--
a controversy in which more time was consumed, says John of Salisbury,
"than the Caesars required to make themselves masters of the world,"
and in which the combatants, having spent at last their whole stock
of dialectic ammunition, resorted to carnal weapons, passing suddenly,
by a very illogical _metabasis_, from "universals" to particulars.
Both parties appealed to Aristotle. By a singular fortune, a pagan
philosopher, introduced into Western Europe by Mohammedans, became
the supreme authority of the Christian world. Aristotle was the
Scripture of the Middle Age. Luther found this authority in his way
and disposed of it in short order, devoting Aristotle without
ceremony to the Devil, as "a damned mischief-making heathen." But
Leibnitz, whose large discourse looked before as well as after,
reinstated not only Aristotle, but Plato, and others of the Greek
philosophers, in their former repute;--"Car ces anciens," he said,
"etaient plus solides qu'on ne croit." He was the first to turn the
tide of popular opinion in their favor.

Not without a struggle was he brought to side with the Nominalists.
Musing, when a boy, in the Rosenthal, near Leipzig, he debated long
with himself,--"Whether he would give up the Substantial Forms of
the Schoolmen." Strange matter for boyish deliberation! Yes, good
youth, by all means, give them up! They have had their day. They
served to amuse the imprisoned intellect of Christendom in times of
ecclesiastical thraldom, when learning knew no other vocation. But
the age into which you are born has its own problems, of nearer
interest and more commanding import. The measuring-reed of science
is to be laid to the heavens, the solar system is to be weighed in a
balance; the age of logical quiddities has passed, the age of
mathematical quantities has come. Give them up! You will soon have
enough to do to take care of your own. What with Dynamics and
Infinitesimals, Pasigraphy and Dyadik, Monads and Majesties,
Concilium AEgyptiacum and Spanish Succession and Hanoverian cabals,
there will be scant room in that busy brain for Substantial Forms.
Let them sleep, dust to dust, with the tomes of Duns Scotus and the
bones of Aquinas!

The "De Principio Individui" was the last treatise of any note in
the sense and style of the old scholastic philosophy. It was also
one of the last blows aimed at scholasticism, which, long undermined
by the Saxon Reformation, received its _coup de grace_ a century
later from the pen of an English wit. "Cornelius," says the author
of "Martinus Scriblerus," told Martin that a shoulder of mutton was
an individual; which Crambe denied, for he had seen it cut into
commons. 'That's true,' quoth the Tutor, 'but you never saw it cut
into shoulders of mutton.' 'If it could be,' quoth Crambe, 'it would
be the loveliest individual of the University.' When he was told
that a _substance_ was that which is subject to _accidents_: 'Then
soldiers,' quoth Crambe, 'are the most substantial people in the
world.' Neither would he allow it to be a good definition of accident,
that it could be present or absent without the destruction of the
subject, since there are a great many accidents that destroy the
subject, as burning does a house and death a man. But as to that,
Cornelius informed him that there was a _natural_ death and a
_logical_ death; and that though a man after his natural death was
incapable of the least parish office, yet he might still keep his
stall among the logical predicaments....

Crambe regretted extremely that _Substantial Forms_, a race of
harmless beings which had lasted for many years and had afforded a
comfortable subsistence to many poor philosophers, should now be
hunted down like so many wolves, without the possibility of retreat.
He considered that it had gone much harder with them than with the
_Essences_, which had retired from the schools into the apothecaries'
shops, where some of them had been advanced into the degree of
_Quintessences_. He thought there should be a retreat for poor
_substantial forms_ amongst the gentlemen-ushers at court; and that
there were, indeed, substantial forms, such as forms of prayer and
forms of government, without which the things themselves could never
long subsist....

Metaphysics were a large field in which to exercise the weapons
which logic had put in their hands. Here Martin and Crambe used to
engage like any prizefighters. And as prize-fighters will agree to
lay aside a buckler, or some such defensive weapon, so Crambe would
agree not to use _simpliciter_ and _secundum quid_, if Martin would
part with _materialiter_ and _formaliter_. But it was found, that,
without the defensive armor of these distinctions, the arguments cut
so deep that they fetched blood at every stroke. Their theses were
picked out of Suarez, Thomas Aquinas, and other learned writers on
those subjects.... One, particularly, remains undecided to this day,--
'An praeter _esse_ reale actualis essentiae sit alind _esse_
necessarium quo res actualiter existat?' In English thus: 'Whether,
besides the real being of actual being, there be any other being
necessary to cause a thing to be?' [8]

[Footnote 8: Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus. Chap. VII.]

Arrived at maturity, Leibnitz rose at once to classic eminence. He
became a conspicuous figure, he became a commanding power, not only
in the intellectual world, of which he constituted himself the centre,
but in part also of the civil. It lay in the nature of his genius to
prove all things, and it lay in his temperament to seek _rapport_
with all sorts of men. He was infinitely related;--not an individual
of note in his day but was linked with him by some common interest
or some polemic grapple; not a _savant_ or statesman with whom
Leibnitz did not spin, on one pretence or another, a thread of
communication. Europe was reticulated with the meshes of his
correspondence. "Never," says Voltaire, "was intercourse among
philosophers more universal; _Leibnitz servait a l'animer_." He
writes now to Spinoza at the Hague, to suggest new methods of
manufacturing lenses,--now to Magliabecchi at Florence, urging, in
elegant Latin verses, the publication of his bibliographical
discoveries,--and now to Grimaldi, Jesuit missionary in China, to
communicate his researches in Chinese philosophy. He hoped by means
of the latter to operate on the Emperor Cham-Hi with the _Dyadik_; [9]
and even suggested said _Dyadik_ as a key to the cipher of the book
"Ye Kim," supposed to contain the sacred mysteries of Fo. He
addresses Louis XIV., now on the subject of a military expedition to
Egypt, (a magnificent idea, which it needed a Napoleon to realize,)
now on the best method of promoting and conserving scientific
knowledge. He corresponds with the Landgrave of Hesse-Rheinfels,
with Bossuet, and with Madame Brinon on the Union of the Catholic
and Protestant Churches, and with Privy-Counsellor von Spanheim on
the Union of the Lutheran and Reformed,--with Pere Des Bosses on
Transubstantiation, and with Samuel Clarke on Time and Space,--with
Remond de Montmort on Plato, and with Franke on Popular Education,--
with the Queen of Prussia (his pupil) on Free-will and Predestination,
and with the Electress Sophia, her mother, (in her eighty-fourth year,)
on English Politics,--with the cabinet of Peter the Great on the
Slavonic and Oriental Languages, and with that of the German Emperor
on the claims of George Lewis to the honors of the Electorate,--and
finally, with all the _savans_ of Europe on all possible scientific
questions.

[Footnote 9: A species of binary arithmetic, invented by Leibnitz,
in which the only figures employed are 0 and 1.--See KORTHOLT'S
_G.C. Leibnitii Epistolae ad Divarsos_, Letter XVIII.]

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