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It was introduced by the Greeks, who regarded a circle as differing infinitesimally from a polygon with a very large number of very small equal sides. It gradually grew in importance, until, when Leibniz invented the Infinitesimal Calculus, it seemed to become the fundamental notion of all higher mathematics.
With this view, she sent to her, the correspondence between Leibniz and Pelisson, and received from her an account of what was passing, between the Bishop of Neustadt, and Molanus. Both the ladies were anxious, to promote the measure, and that Bossuet should take in it, the leading part, on the side of the Catholics. This was mentioned to Lewis the Fourteenth, and had his approbation.
These words are a very good explication of the grounds of this system; they are, as it were, the unfolding and key of it; but at the same time they are the very things at which the objections of those who take this system to be impossible are levelled. The law M. Leibniz speaks of supposes a decree of God, and shows wherein this system agrees with that of occasional causes.
In a memoir read before the Berlin Academy of Sciences, which he had founded in the first year of the eighteenth century, Leibniz first sowed the seed of the twin sciences of comparative philology and ethnology, to which we owe the fruitful results of the historical and critical school. That century was passed in the necessary collection of facts, of data.
But if the choice were open to me, I should prefer natural history to political, and the customs and laws God has established in nature, to what is observed among mankind. Leibniz now conceived the idea of putting together all the passages in Bayle's works which interested him, and writing a systematic answer to them. Before he had leisure to finish the task, Bayle died.
Of course, this intellect might be that of a being infinitely superior to man, who would found the materiality of things at the same time that he bound them together: such was the hypothesis of Leibniz and of Spinoza. But it is not necessary to go so far, and, for the effect we have here to obtain, the human intellect is enough: such is precisely the Kantian solution.
M. Pierre Bayle had all these articles before him when he inserted a note on Leibniz's doctrine in his article on 'Rorarius', in the first edition of his Historical and Critical Dictionary. The point of connexion between Rorarius and Leibniz was no more than this, that both held views about the souls of beasts.
'In these observations I have merely cleared and unfolded those which M. Leibniz has done me the honour to examine: and now I shall make some reflexions upon his answers.
What is even more remarkable for the notion of infinite organisation has been familiar to the learned at least since the time of Leibniz the theatre of science is transformed no less than the actors and the play.
M. Leibniz, through the penetration of his great genius, has very well conceived the extent and strength of this objection, and what remedy ought to be applied to the main inconveniency. I do not doubt but that he will smooth the rough parts of his system, and teach us some excellent things about the nature of spirits.
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