LEIBNITZ (Leibniz), GOTTFRIED WILHELM (1646–1716), German philosopher, mathematician and man of affairs, was born on the 1st of July 1646 at Leipzig, where his father was professor of moral philosophy. Though the name Leibniz, Leibnitz or Lubeniecz was originally Slavonic, his ancestors were German, and for three generations had been in the employment of the Saxon government. Young Leibnitz was sent to the Nicolai school at Leipzig, but, from 1652 when his father died, seems to have been for the most part his own teacher. From his father he had acquired a love of historical study. The German books at his command were soon read through, and with the help of two Latin books—the Thesaurus Chronologicus of Calvisius and an illustrated edition of Livy—he learned Latin at the age of eight. His father’s library was now thrown open to him, to his great joy, with the permission, “Tolle, lege.” Before he was twelve he could read Latin easily and had begun Greek; he had also remarkable facility in writing Latin verse. He next turned to the study of logic, attempting already to reform its doctrines, and zealously reading the scholastics and some of the Protestant theologians.
At the age of fifteen, he entered the university of Leipzig as a law student. His first two years were devoted to philosophy under Jakob Thomasius, a Neo-Aristotelian, who is looked upon as having founded the scientific study of the history of philosophy in Germany. It was at this time probably that he first made acquaintance with the modern thinkers who had already revolutionized science and philosophy, Francis Bacon, Cardan and Campanella, Kepler, Galileo and Descartes; and he began to consider the difference between the old and new ways of regarding nature. He resolved to study mathematics. It was not, however, till the summer of 1663, which he spent at Jena under E. Weigel, that he obtained the instructions of a mathematician of repute; nor was the deeper study of mathematics entered upon till his visit to Paris and acquaintance with Huygens many years later.
The next three years he devoted to legal studies, and in 1666 applied for the degree of doctor of law, with a view to obtaining the post of assessor. Being refused on the ground of his youth he left his native town for ever. The doctor’s degree refused him there was at once (November 5, 1666) conferred on him at Altdorf—the university town of the free city of Nuremberg—where his brilliant dissertation procured him the immediate offer of a professor’s chair. This, however, he declined, having, as he said, “very different things in view.”
Leibnitz, not yet twenty-one years of age, was already the author of several remarkable essays. In his bachelor’s dissertation De principio individui (1663), he defended the nominalistic doctrine that individuality is constituted by the whole entity or essence of a thing; his arithmetical tract De complexionibus, published in an extended form under the title De arte combinatoria (1666), is an essay towards his life-long project of a re-formed symbolism and method of thought; and besides these there are our juridical essays, including the Nova methodus docendi discendique juris, written in the intervals of his journey from Leipzig to Altdorf. This last essay is remarkable, not only for the reconstruction it attempted of the Corpus Juris, but as containing the first clear recognition of the importance of the historical method in law. Nuremberg was a centre of the Rosicrucians, and Leibnitz, busying himself with writings of the alchemists, soon gained such a knowledge of their tenets that he was supposed to be one of the secret brotherhood, and was even elected their secretary. A more important result of his visit to Nuremberg was his acquaintance with Johann Christian von Boyneburg (1622–1672), formerly first minister to the elector of Mainz, and one of the most distinguished German statesmen of the day. By his advice Leibnitz printed his Nova methodus in 1667, dedicated it to the elector, and, going to Mainz, presented it to him in person. It was thus that Leibnitz entered the service of the elector of Mainz, at first as an assistant in the revision of the statute-book, afterwards on more important work.
The policy of the elector, which the pen of Leibnitz was now called upon to promote, was to maintain the security of the German empire, threatened on the west by the aggressive power of France, on the east by Turkey and Russia. Thus when in 1669 the crown of Poland became vacant, it fell to Leibnitz to support the claims of the German candidate, which he did in his first political writing, Specimen demonstrationum politicarum pro rege Polonorum eligendo, attempting, under the guise of a Catholic Polish nobleman, to show by mathematical demonstration that it was necessary in the interest of Poland that it should have the count palatine of Neuburg as its king. But neither the diplomatic skill of Boyneburg, who had been sent as plenipotentiary to the election at Warsaw, nor the arguments of Leibnitz were successful, and a Polish prince was elected to fill the vacant throne.
A greater danger threatened Germany in the aggressions of Louis XIV. (see France: History). Though Holland was in most immediate danger, the seizure of Lorraine in 1670 showed that Germany too was threatened. It was in this year that Leibnitz wrote his Thoughts on Public Safety,[1] in which he urged the formation of a new “Rheinbund” for the protection of Germany, and contended that the states of Europe should employ their power, not against one another, but in the conquest of the non-Christian world, in which Egypt, “one of the best situated lands in the world,” would fall to France. The plan thus proposed of averting the threatened attack on Germany by a French expedition to Egypt was discussed with Boyneburg, and obtained the approval of the elector. French relations with Turkey were at the time so strained as to make a breach imminent, and at the close of 1671, about the time when the war with Holland broke out, Louis himself was approached by a letter from Boyneburg and a short memorial from the pen of Leibnitz, who attempted to show that Holland itself, as a mercantile power trading with the East, might be best attacked through Egypt, while nothing would be easier for France or would more largely increase her power than the conquest of Egypt. On February 12, 1672, a request came from the French secretary of state, Simon Arnauld de Pomponne (1618–1699), that Leibnitz should go to Paris. Louis seems still to have kept the matter in view, but never granted Leibnitz the personal interview he desired, while Pomponne wrote, “I have nothing against the plan of a holy war, but such plans, you know, since the days of St Louis, have ceased to be the fashion.” Not yet discouraged, Leibnitz wrote a full account of his project for the king,[2] and a summary of the same[3] evidently intended for Boyneburg. But Boyneburg died in December 1672, before the latter could be sent to him. Nor did the former ever reach its destination. The French quarrel with the Porte was made up, and the plan of a French expedition to Egypt disappeared from practical politics till the time of Napoleon. The history of this scheme, and the reason of Leibnitz’s journey to Paris, long remained hidden in the archives of the Hanoverian library. It was on his taking possession of Hanover in 1803 that Napoleon learned, through the Consilium Aegyptiacum, that the idea of a French conquest of Egypt had been first put forward by a German philosopher. In the same year there was published in London an account of the Justa dissertatio[4] of which the British Government had procured a copy in 1799. But it was only with the appearance of the edition of Leibnitz’s works begun by Onno Klopp in 1864 that the full history of the scheme was made known.
Leibnitz had other than political ends in view in his visit to France. It was as the centre of literature and science that Paris chiefly attracted him. Political duties never made him lose sight of his philosophical and scientific interests. At Mainz he was still busied with the question of the relation between the old and new methods in philosophy. In a letter to Jakob
- ↑ Bedenken, welchergestalt securitas publica interna et externa und status praesens jetzigen Umständen nach im Reich auf festen Fuss zu stellen.
- ↑ De expeditione Aegyptiaca regi Franciae proponenda justa dissertatio.
- ↑ Consilium Aegyptiacum.
- ↑ A Summary Account of Leibnitz’s Memoir addressed to Lewis the Fourteenth, &c. [edited by Granville Penn], (London, 1803).
