most ardent views of the advancement of knowledge and the progress of man.
The whole history of the early years of Leibnitz forms a precious record of what we might call speculative experience. It reveals the self-educating genius of the really original mind, and shows a singular development of abstract thought at an age when the attention is usually engrossed with the objects of sense.[1] In his recorded experience, at the age of sixteen, are to be found the dim forms of those problems which agitated his thoughts during the most active years of his life. For days together, as he tells us, he was wont to pursue his walks alone in the woods of Rosenthal, near Leipsic, revolving in his soul the first principles of that mysterious life, to a consciousness of which he had become awake. Before he had studied mathematics, physics, or morals, he was led to the conception of the higher Philosophy. He felt, what can be felt only by the true metaphysician,—the need for a scheme of eternal first principles on which all knowledge must depend. This was the theme of his earliest writings. His speculations on a universal language, grounded on what he calls the alphabet of thought, and his treatise De principio individui, published when under twenty, display the metaphysician capable of going
- ↑ It would be interesting to collect illustrations of such experience out of the biographies of thinking men. A solemn moral regard is due to the cases of those especially (as Pascal) in whom a personal religious sentiment is found to mingle with the operations of a mind engaged in the processes of reflection, and which finds in the consciousness of sin and guilt a new element of difficulty and distress. Such instances suggest the whole subject of the higher religious experience, of which the phenomena are extremely important to the student of Scripture, and of the human spirit.
