did the work of his comrades as well as his own. He says, that, at the age of fourteen, he wrote three hundred Latin verses in one day. Before he was twenty he had, as people said then, gone “through mathematics and metaphysics,” and was trying, as we saw him in the wood, to make a system out of the systems of other men. It is evident to us now, looking at his life and works, that he was of an imaginative and impressionable cast of character, full of beautiful ideas and happy suggestions, but unable to distinguish between convictions of the understanding and perceptions of the imagination. He had the large credulity which attends the mathematical faculties, and the endless resources for evading the realities of life which are at the command of the metaphysician. What we learn of his person and ways confirms this view. He was extremely shortsighted, and his large head, made heavier by a great excrescence at the top, fell forward as he walked, so that he saw little of external objects. When absorbed in any study, he would scarcely leave his chair for weeks, even to go to bed; yet he was genial, frank, and sympathetic in intercourse, and highly impressionable. It really seems as if those with whom he associated could turn him into any path of pursuit, by engaging his imagination and sympathy in it, though his speculative tendencies sooner or later brought his subject round into his own original track. By some means or other he became early and deeply impressed with the notion that the most fortunate position for a philosopher was in the sunshine and shelter of court favour; and, if he had an immoveable prejudice throughout life, it was this. He suffered under the imputation of avarice; but it is not necessary to suppose him fond of money because his money accumulated when he had no way of spending it. His eagerness about appointments near princes seems to have arisen from his notion that such a mode of life afforded ease, honour, and leisure. This last benefit is precisely what the courtier-philosopher has to give up as hopeless. The ease and honour are questionable enough; the leisure is out of the question, as Leibnitz found.
When he was twenty-one, he became acquainted with the Chancellor of the Elector of Mayence, who recommended him to qualify himself for a post at the Elector’s court. He was scarcely settled there when he was hard at work at his scientific and elaborate demonstration that the Prince of Neuburg ought to be elected to the crown of Poland. The Prince was not chosen; but this new method of electioneering caused much sensation, as it might well do; and it fixed the author in place and favour. Next, at the minister’s solicitation, he wrote a treatise on behalf of orthodoxy, to show that rigid logic was not at variance with the doctrine of the Trinity.
Two or three years after, he obtained leave to travel, and spent a considerable time among the great men of the scientific world in Paris, and then in England, where he received news of the death of his patron, the Elector of Mayence. His friend, the minister, had died while he was at Paris. In pursuance of his constant view of what a philosopher should aim at, he wrote to the Duke of Brunswick about being adrift, and received the hoped-for invitation to be a councillor at the Duke’s court, with a pension, and liberty to travel. Leibnitz was now full of unconcealable happiness; and the first use he made of his patron’s liberality was to live in Paris for fifteen months. As soon as he repaired to his court, he was employed on political matters again; and he devoted his fine faculties to pleading for the Princes of Germany, on certain points of controversy, without losing the favour of Austria. The Duke of Brunswick died in 1679, by which time Leibnitz was three-and-thirty. The new ruler engaged him to write the History of the House of Brunswick! He spent three years in travelling to gather materials, and more in arranging them; and when the result appeared, it was found to be a valuable collection of well-arranged documents, which any industrious man of intelligence could have prepared; with a preface, which it required a speculative mind to write,—going back as it did to the first principles of natural law and the law of nations. As for the History of the House of Brunswick, it was to come in time. It involved, among other collateral tasks, that of a research into the connection of the House of Brunswick with that of Este; and this piece of genealogical handiwork obtained for the philosopher a sinecure post, which would enable him to devote himself exclusively to the history. He spent precious years in collecting all the notices of the Ducal House that had ever been printed, and issued some of them in separate volumes: but as to the History,—how did it repay the sacrifice of such a portion of such a man’s life? It was never written;—and no wonder. It was to have set out from a somewhat remote point—the primitive state of the globe generally, and of Germany in particular. So much for setting speculative philosophers down in courts, to write memoirs of Ducal Houses!
We see him afterwards at the Prussian court, under the patronage of the inquisitive, acute, learned, and somewhat pedantic Queen of Prussia, whose summons the philosopher was obliged to obey, when she wished for metaphysical or scientific conversation, and whose puzzling questions he had to answer as he best could. Her comment, when he failed to satisfy her inquisitiveness about the origin of the universe and the nature of the human soul, was that there was nothing like the mathematicians for credulity:they would put faith in any chimera that was offered to them by their own fancy, or that of other people. Elsewhere than at court, she would perhaps have been asked what could be offered but chimeras, when inquirers insist on being informed of the unknowable?
Leibnitz was consulted by Peter the Great about his Russian reforms, and was made a privy-councillor, in return for his advice on the conduct of civilisation. He went to the Emperor of Austria, to entreat him to establish an Institute like that which he saw to be under doom at Berlin. He was made an Aulic Councillor, and Baron of the Empire, at Vienna; had a pension conferred on him, and was invited to reside there: but the Elector of Hanover was just then made