Thomasius (1669) he contends that the mechanical explanation
of nature by magnitude, figure and motion alone is not inconsistent
with the doctrines of Aristotle’s Physics, in which he
finds more truth than in the Meditations of Descartes. Yet these
qualities of bodies, he argues in 1668 (in an essay published
without his knowledge under the title Confessio naturae contra
atheistas), require an incorporeal principle, or God, for their
ultimate explanation. He also wrote at this time a defence of the
doctrine of the Trinity against Wissowatius (1669), and an essay
on philosophic style, introductory to an edition of the Antibarbarus
of Nizolius (1670). Clearness and distinctness alone,
he says, are what makes a philosophic style, and no language is
better suited for this popular exposition than the German.
In 1671 he issued a Hypothesis physica nova, in which, agreeing
with Descartes that corporeal phenomena should be explained
from motion, he carried out the mechanical explanation of nature
by contending that the original of this motion is a fine aether,
similar to light, or rather constituting it, which, penetrating all
bodies in the direction of the earth’s axis, produces the phenomena
of gravity, elasticity, &c. The first part of the essay, on
concrete motion, was dedicated to the Royal Society of London,
the second, on abstract motion, to the French Academy.
At Paris Leibnitz met with Arnauld, Malebranche and, more important still, with Christian Huygens. This was pre-eminently the period of his mathematical and physical activity. Before leaving Mainz he was able to announce[1] an imposing list of discoveries, and plans for discoveries, arrived at by means of his new logical art, in natural philosophy, mathematics, mechanics, optics, hydrostatics, pneumatics and nautical science, not to speak of new ideas in law, theology and politics. Chief among these discoveries was that of a calculating machine for performing more complicated operations than that of Pascal—multiplying, dividing and extracting roots, as well as adding and subtracting. This machine was exhibited to the Academy of Paris and to the Royal Society of London, and Leibnitz was elected a fellow of the latter society in April 1673.[2] In January of this year he had gone to London as an attaché on a political mission from the elector of Mainz, returning in March to Paris, and while in London had become personally acquainted with Oldenburg, the secretary of the Royal Society, with whom he had already corresponded, with Boyle the chemist and Pell the mathematician. It is from this period that we must date the impulse that directed him anew to mathematics. By Pell he had been referred to Mercator’s Logarithmotechnica as already containing some numerical observations which Leibnitz had thought original on his own part; and, on his return to Paris, he devoted himself to the study of higher geometry under Huygens, entering almost at once upon the series of investigations which culminated in his discovery of the differential and integral calculus (see Infinitesimal Calculus).
Shortly after his return to Paris in 1673, Leibnitz ceased to be in the Mainz service any more than in name, but in the same year entered the employment of Duke John Frederick of Brunswick-Lüneburg, with whom he had corresponded for some time. In 1676 he removed at the duke’s request to Hanover, travelling thither by way of London and Amsterdam. At Amsterdam he saw and conversed with Spinoza, and carried away with him extracts from the latter’s unpublished Ethica.
For the next forty years, and under three successive princes, Leibnitz was in the service of the Brunswick family, and his headquarters were at Hanover, where he had charge of the ducal library. Leibnitz thus passed into a political atmosphere formed by the dynastic aims of the typical German state (see Hanover; Brunswick). He supported the claim of Hanover to appoint an ambassador at the congress of Nimeguen (1676)[3] to defend the establishment of primogeniture in the Lüneburg branch of the Brunswick family; and, when the proposal was made to raise the duke of Hanover to the electorate, he had to show that this did not interfere with the rights of the duke of Württemberg. In 1692 the duke of Hanover was made elector. Before, and with a view to this, Leibnitz had been employed by him to write the history of the Brunswick-Lüneburg family, and, to collect material for his history, had undertaken a journey through Germany and Italy in 1687–1690, visiting and examining the records in Marburg, Frankfort-on-the-Main, Munich, Vienna (where he remained nine months), Venice, Modena and Rome. At Rome he was offered the custodianship of the Vatican library on condition of his joining the Catholic Church.
About this time, too, his thoughts and energies were partly taken up with the scheme for the reunion of the Catholic and Protestant Churches. At Mainz he had joined in an attempt made by the elector and Boyneburg to bring about a reconciliation, and now, chiefly through the energy and skill of the Catholic Royas de Spinola, and from the spirit of moderation which prevailed among the theologians he met with at Hanover in 1683, it almost seemed as if some agreement might be arrived at. In 1686 Leibnitz wrote his Systema theologicum,[4] in which he strove to find common ground for Protestants and Catholics in the details of their creeds. But the English revolution of 1688 interfered with the scheme in Hanover, and it was soon found that the religious difficulties were greater than had at one time appeared. In the letters to Leibnitz from Bossuet, the landgrave of Hessen-Rheinfels, and Madame de Brinon, the aim is obviously to make converts to Catholicism, not to arrive at a compromise with Protestantism, and when it was found that Leibnitz refused to be converted the correspondence ceased. A further scheme of church union in which Leibnitz was engaged, that between the Reformed and Lutheran Churches, met with no better success.
Returning from Italy in 1690, Leibnitz was appointed librarian at Wolfenbüttel by Duke Anton of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel. Some years afterwards began his connexion with Berlin through his friendship with the electress Sophie Charlotte of Brandenburg and her mother the princess Sophie of Hanover. He was invited to Berlin in 1700, and on the 11th July of that year the academy (Akademie der Wissenschaften) he had planned was founded, with himself as its president for life. In the same year he was made a privy councillor of justice by the elector of Brandenburg. Four years before he had received a like honour from the elector of Hanover, and twelve years afterwards the same distinction was conferred upon him by Peter the Great, to whom he gave a plan for an academy at St Petersburg, carried out after the czar’s death. After the death of his royal pupil in 1705 his visits to Berlin became less frequent and less welcome, and in 1711 he was there for the last time. In the following year he undertook his fifth and last journey to Vienna, where he stayed till 1714. An attempt to found an academy of science there was defeated by the opposition of the Jesuits, but he now attained the honour he had coveted of an imperial privy councillorship (1712), and, either at this time or on a previous occasion (1709), was made a baron of the empire (Reichsfreiherr). Leibnitz returned to Hanover in September 1714, but found the elector George Louis had already gone to assume the crown of England. Leibnitz would gladly have followed him to London, but was bidden to remain at Hanover and finish his history of Brunswick.
During the last thirty years Leibnitz had been busy with many matters. Mathematics, natural science,[5] philosophy, theology, history jurisprudence, politics (particularly the French wars with Germany, and the question of the Spanish succession), economics and philology, all gained a share of his attention; almost all of them he enriched with original observations.
His genealogical researches in Italy—through which he established the common origin of the families of Brunswick and
- ↑ In a letter to the duke of Brunswick-Lüneburg (autumn 1671), Werke, ed. Klopp, iii. 253 sq.
- ↑ He was made a foreign member of the French Academy in 1700.
- ↑ Caesarini Furstenerii tractatus de jure suprematus ac legationis principum Germaniae (Amsterdam, 1677); Entretiens de Philarète et d’Eugène sur le droit d’ambassade (Duisb., 1677).
- ↑ Not published till 1819. It is on this work that the assertion has been founded that Leibnitz was at heart a Catholic—a supposition clearly disproved by his correspondence.
- ↑ In his Protogaea (1691) he developed the notion of the historical genesis of the present condition of the earth’s surface. Cf. O. Peschel, Gesch. d. Erdkunde (Munich, 1865), pp. 615 sq.
