in a measure cleared with the Peace of Ryswick, was soon blacker than ever; a clause of that peace itself had seriously alarmed German Protestants; and at home and at the last period of the religious policy of Louis XIV was that of the undisputed ascendancy of the principles of Madame de Maintenon.[1]
It would, I fear, take me too far on the present occasion, were I to seek to illustrate with any degree of detail the connexion between the religious and the political conceptions of Leibniz; and it is to his work as a politician proper that I now turn. It may be said to cover the whole of his life from the time when, after being refused the doctorate of law by the University of his own native Leipzig on account of his youth (he was then twenty years of age), he had been promoted to this degree at Altdorf, but, declining the professorship offered him there, had entered the service of the Elector of Mainz. From this time forth he became a courtier and a placeman, but without ever surrendering his independence of judgment or doing violence to his sense of self-respect. He was only too well aware of the prejudice existing in the official world against taking the advice of scholars and bookmen; when in later days he seemed on the point of permanently entering into the Imperial service at Vienna, he was anxious to do so in the recognised position of a councillor of state as well as that of a librarian. The difference between the position of an official and that of an unofficial adviser was to be brought home to him with painful distinctness, when, after the death of the Electress Sophia, the 'Master' (as with her usual humorous twinkle she was in the habit of calling her eldest son, whose qualities certainly included that of knowing his own mind) speedily adjusted the relations between himself and Leibniz to
- ↑ Leibniz s lesser project of a union among the Protestant confessions must be left aside here, though it had important bearings both upon the politics of the Empire, and the prospects of the English Succession. For his letter on the subject to Burnet, written about the end of 1698, and the Bishop s reply, see H. C. Foxcroft, Life of Gilbert Burnet, Bishop of Salisbury (Cambridge, 1907), pp. 361–4.
