to lay aside a buckler, or some such defensive weapon, so Crambe would agree not to use simpliciter and secundum quid, if Martin would part with materialiter and formaliter. But it was found, that, without the defensive armor of these distinctions, the arguments cut so deep that they fetched blood at every stroke. Their theses were picked out of Suarez, Thomas Aquinas, and other learned writers on those subjects. . . . . One, particularly, remains undecided to this day,—'An præter esse reale actualis essentiæ sit alind esse necessarium quo res actualiter existat?' In English thus: 'Whether, besides the real being of actual being, there be any other being necessary to cause a thing to be?'[1]
Arrived at maturity, Leibnitz rose at once to classic eminence. He became a conspicuous figure, he became a commanding power, not only in the intellectual world, of which he constituted himself the centre, but in part also of the civil. It lay in the nature of his genius to prove all things, and it lay in his temperament to seek rapport with all sorts of men. He was infinitely related;—not an individual of note in his day but was linked with him by some common interest or some polemic grapple; not a savant or statesman with whom Leibnitz did not spin, on one pretence or another, a thread of communication. Europe was reticulated with the meshes of his correspondence. "Never," says Voltaire, "was intercourse among philosophers more universal; Leibnitz servait à l'animer." He writes now to Spinoza at the Hague, to suggest new methods of manufacturing lenses,—now to Magliabecchi at Florence, urging, in elegant Latin verses, the publication of his bibliographical discoveries,—and now to Grimaldi, Jesuit missionary in China, to communicate his researches in Chinese philosophy. He hoped by means of the latter to operate on the Emperor Cham-Hi with the Dyadik;[2] and even suggested said Dyadik as a key to the cipher of the book "Ye Kim," supposed to contain the sacred mysteries of Fo. He addresses Louis XIV., now on the subject of a military expedition to Egypt, (a magnificent idea, which it needed a Napoleon to realize,) now on the best method of promoting and conserving scientific knowledge. He corresponds with the Landgrave of Hesse-Rheinfels, with Bossuet, and with Madame Brinon on the Union of the Catholic and Protestant Churches, and with Privy-Counsellor von Spanheim on the Union of the Lutheran and Reformed,—with Père Des Bosses on Transubstantiation, and with Samuel Clarke on Time and Space,—with Remond de Montmort on Plato, and with Franke on Popular Education,—with the Queen of Prussia (his pupil) on Free-will and Predestination, and with the Electress Sophia, her mother, (in her eighty-fourth year,) on English Politics,—with the cabinet of Peter the Great on the Slavonic and Oriental Languages, and with that of the German Emperor on the claims of George Lewis to the honors of the Electorate,—and finally, with all the savans of Europe on all possible scientific questions.
Of this world-wide correspondence a portion related to the sore subject of his litigated claim to originality in the discovery of the Differential Calculus,—a matter in which Leibnitz felt himself grievously wronged, and complained with justice of the treatment he received at the hands of his contemporaries. The controversy between him and Newton, respecting this hateful topic, would never have originated with either of these illustrious men, had it depended on them alone to vindicate their respective claims. Officious and ill-advised friends of the English philosopher, partly from misguided zeal and partly from levelled malice, preferred on his behalf a charge of plagiarism against the German, which Newton was not likely to have urged for himself. "The new Calculus, which Europe lauds, is nothing less," they suggested, "than your fluxionary method, which
