Leibniz's New Essays Concerning the Human Understanding · John Dewey
THE MAN.
It is noteworthy that even before Leibniz went to Paris and to London he had conceived the idea of a society of learned men for the investigation, the systematization, and the publication of scientific truth in all its varied forms,--a society which should in breadth include the whole sphere of sciences, but should not treat them as so many isolated disciplines, but as members of one system. This idea was quickened when Leibniz saw the degree in which it had already been realized in the two great world-capitals. He never ceased to try to introduce similar academies wherever he had influence. In 1700 his labors bore their fruit in one instance. The Academy at Berlin was founded, and Leibniz was its first, and indeed life-long, president. But disappointment met him at Vienna, Dresden, and St. Petersburg, where he proposed similar societies. Any sketch of Leibniz's life, however brief, would be imperfect which did not mention the names at least of two remarkable women,--remarkable in themselves, and remarkable in their friendship with Leibniz. These were Sophia, grand-daughter of James I. of England (and thus the link by which the House of Brunswick finally came to rule over Great Britain) and wife of the Duke of Brunswick, and her daughter Sophia Charlotte, wife of the first king of Prussia. The latter, in particular, gave Leibniz every encouragement. She was personally deeply interested in all theological and philosophical questions. Upon her death-bed, in 1705, she is said to have told those about her that they were not to mourn for her, as she should now be able to satisfy her desire to learn about things which Leibniz had never sufficiently explained.
Her death marks the beginning of a period in Leibniz's life which it is not pleasant to dwell upon. New rulers arose that knew not Leibniz. It cannot be said that from this time till his death in Hanover in 1716 Leibniz had much joy or satisfaction. His best friends were dead; his political ambitions were disappointed; he was suspected of coldness and unfriendliness by the courts both of Berlin and Hanover; Paris and Vienna were closed to him, so far as any wide influence was concerned, by his religious faith; the controversy with the friends of Newton still followed him. He was a man of the most remarkable intellectual gifts, of an energy which could be satisfied only with wide fields of action; and he found himself shut in by narrow intrigue to a petty round of courtly officialism. It is little wonder that the following words fell from his lips: "Germany is the only country in the world that does not know how to recognize the fame of its children and to make that fame immortal. It forgets itself; it forgets its own, unless foreigners make it mindful of its own treasures." A Scotch friend of Leibniz, who happened to be in Hanover when he died, wrote that Leibniz "was buried more like a robber than what he really was,--the ornament of his country." Such was the mortal end of the greatest intellectual genius since Aristotle. But genius is not a matter to be bounded in life or in death by provincial courts. Leibniz remains a foremost citizen in that "Kingdom of Spirits" in whose formation he found the meaning of the world.
Ideas discussed in this chapter
Text from Project Gutenberg, public domain in the United States.