418 LEIBNITZ
friends now began to fear that he would never leave scholastic subtleties, "not knowing," as he said, "that my mind could not be satisfied with one kind of things."
In the autumn of 1661, at the age of fifteen, he entered the university of Leipsic as a student of law. His first two years were devoted to philosophy under Scherzer, a follower of the scholastics, and Jacob 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 discuss with himself the difference between the old and new ways of regarding nature."I remember," he says, "walking alone, at the age of fifteen, in a wood near Leipsic called the Rosenthal, to deliberate whether I should retain the doctrine of substantial forms. At last mechanism triumphed and induced me to apply myself to mathematics." It was not, however, till the summer of 1663, which he spent at Jena under 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 three years following his return from Jena were devoted to legal studies, and in 1666 Leibnitz became a candidate for the degree of doctor of law. The doctorate was a pathway to the post of assessor which he coveted, but through the opposition of older candidates for the same office his youth was made an excuse for refusing him the degree. Upon this 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 reformed symbolism and method of thought; and besides these there are four juridical essays, including the Nova methodus docendi discendique juris, written in the intervals of his journey from Leipsic 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.
Rejecting the professorial career, but without any definite plan for the future, Leibnitz turned his steps to Nuremberg. That city 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 Boineburg, formerly first minister to the elector of Mainz, and one of the most distinguished states men 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, 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 Boineburg, 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. and the wars of conquest on which he was entering. Though Holland was in most immediate danger from his arms, 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 the share of France. The plan thus proposed of averting the threatened attack on Germany by a French expedition to Egypt was discussed with Boineburg, 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 Boineburg 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, Pomponne, that the author of the memorial should further explain himself, and on the 18th of next month Leibnitz started for Paris. Louis seems still to have kept the matter in view, but never granted Leibnitz the personal interview he desired, while Pomponne wrote from the camp before Doesburg, "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 Boineburg. But Boineburg 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 Napoleon menaced the power of England by the same means as those by which Louis had been invited to cripple Holland. 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 Ægyptiacum, 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.
- ↑ Bedenken, welchergestalt securitas publica interna et externa und status præsens jetzigen Umständen nach auf festen Fuss zu stellen.
- ↑ De expeditione Ægyptiaca regi Franciæ proponenda justa dissertatio.
- ↑ Consilium Ægyptiacum.
- ↑ A Summary Account of Leibnitz's Memoir addressed to Lewis the Fourteenth, &c. [edited by Granville Penn], London, 1803.
