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Updated: May 10, 2025
So that the idea of Leibnitz, and of Bonnet, that animals form a great scale of being, in which there are a series of gradations from the most complicated form to the lowest and simplest; that idea, though not exactly in the form in which it was propounded by those philosophers, turns out to be substantially correct.
He reckons among his progenitors and relatives such names as Shakspeare, Goethe, Milton, the two Bacons, Lessing, Richter, Schiller, Carlyle, Hegel, Luther, Behmen, Swedenborg, Gustavus Adolphus, William of Orange, Cromwell, Frederick II., Wellington, Newton, Leibnitz, Humboldt, Beethoven, Handel, Turner; and nations might be enriched out of the names that remain when the supreme ones in each class have been mentioned.
In the Preface to the first edition of the "Principia," Newton says, "It is ten years since, being in correspondence with M. Leibnitz, and having instructed him that I was in possession of a method of determining tangents and solving questions involving maxima and minima, a method which included irrational expressions, and having concealed it by transposing the letters, he replied to me that he had discovered a similar method, which he communicated, differing from mine only in the terms and signs, as well as in the generation of the quantities."
After all Carl Ludwig offered him ample freedom in philosophizing. But he beat down the tempting images and sought relief in the problem posited by Leibnitz. In vain: his manuscript still lay open, Proposition xxxv. was under his eye.
But these two Germanies are not the great Germany, that of the artists, the poets, the thinkers, that of Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Goethe, Schiller, Heine, Leibnitz, Kant, Hegel, Liebig. This latter Germany is good, generous, humane, pacific; it finds expression in the touching phrase of Goethe, who when asked to write against us replied that he could not find it in his heart to hate the French.
In the contemporaries Spinoza and Locke, the two schools of modern philosophy, the Continental, starting from Descartes, and the English, which followed Bacon, had reached the extreme of divergence and opposition, Spinoza was a rationalistic pantheist, Locke, an empirical individualist. With Leibnitz a twofold approximation begins.
The discovery of fluxions, which he claimed, was contested by Leibnitz, and led to a long and bitter controversy between the two philosophers. He twice sat in Parliament for his Univ., and was Master of the Mint from 1699, in which capacity he presented reports on the coinage. He was knighted in 1705, and d. at Kensington in 1727.
Thus, while the little ones were sleeping in the same common room at night, William and his father were often heard discussing the ideas of such abstruse thinkers as Newton and Leibnitz, whose names must have sounded strange indeed to the ordinary frequenters of the Hanover barracks.
We cannot here attempt to trace the history of German Idealism, from its source in the writings of Leibnitz, through the logical school of Wolfius and his successors, till it reached its culminating point in the philosophy of Hegel: we shall content ourselves with a brief reference to the fundamental principles of Kant's system, which may be justly said to have contained the prolific germs, or, at least, to have determined the prevailing character, of all the subsequent speculations of the German schools.
Maupertuis, however, was very proud of his discovery, which, he considered, embodied one of the principal reasons for believing in the existence of God; and he was therefore exceedingly angry when, shortly after Voltaire's arrival in Berlin, a Swiss mathematician, Koenig, published a polite memoir attacking both its accuracy and its originality, and quoted in support of his contention an unpublished letter by Leibnitz, in which the law was more exactly expressed.
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