"Leibnitz" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... words have come down to us? Have they not been equally subject to accident, and are they not often used by Hegel himself in senses which would have been quite unintelligible to their original inventors—as for example, when he speaks of the 'ground' of Leibnitz ('Everything has a sufficient ground') as identical with his own doctrine of the 'notion' (Wallace's Hegel), or the 'Being and Not-being' of Heracleitus as the same with ...
— Sophist • Plato
... instantly stabbed by two of her own domestics in an apartment adjoining that in which she herself was. The French court was justly offended at this atrocious deed; yet it met with vindicators, among whom was Leibnitz, whose name was disgraced by the cause which he attempted to justify. Christina was sensible that she was now regarded with horror in France, and would gladly have visited England, but she received no encouragement ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 341, Saturday, November 15, 1828. • Various
... Historio-Physiological Inquiries into the Origin and Existence of the Human Soul. Of a somewhat similar school, we have the second volume of the collected works of FRANZ VON BAADER, and separate from these, by Dr. FRANZ HOFFMANN, Franz Baader in his relations to Spinoza, Leibnitz, Kant, Jacobi, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Herbart. Six groschens worth of stout and vivid abuse of the atheist FEUERBACH has also been published by ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 5, No. 3, March, 1852 • Various
... Leibnitz, Descartes, Fichte, Hegel, Spinoza, Bishop Berkeley, were once clothed with a "brief authority;" but Berkeley ended his metaphysical theory with a treatise on the healing properties of tar-water, and Hegel was an inveterate snuff-taker. The circumlocution and cold categories ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... W. (Vol. vi., p. 376.) says that Dutens published at Geneva, in six volumes 4to., with prefaces, the entire works of Leibnitz. This statement is thus qualified by ...
— Notes and Queries, No. 181, April 16, 1853 • Various
... wrote down end to end all the possible relations that forty-eight figures could be put into you'd need a lifetime to write them down. Why, just with an alphabet of twenty-four letters, Leibnitz the great mathematician, calculated that over six hundred septillions of easily pronounceable words, none over three syllables long, could be arranged. We have room enough to arrange any trifling little matter like seventy or eighty million addresses, although, in truth, the gang-punch merely ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... is hard to avoid doubt; thus, for the existence of God, Descartes', Kant's, and Leibnitz's proofs are not the same, and mutually destroy one another. The creation of the world by atoms, or by a spirit, remains inconceivable. I feel myself, at the same time, matter and thought, while all the ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... He has no biographer. M. Walferdin wrote (in an edition of Diderot's Works, Paris, 1821, Vol. XII p. 115): "Nous nous occupons depuis longtemps rassembler les matriaux qui doivent servir venger la mmoire du philosophe de la patrie de Leibnitz, et dans l'ouvrage que nous nous proposons de publier sous le titre "D'Holbach jug par ses contemporains" nous esprons faire justement apprcier ce savant si estimable par la profondeur et la varit de ses connaissances, si prcieux sa famille et ses amis par la puret et ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... physiogenesis, at the history of the evolution of functions, at the ontogenesis and phylogenesis of vital processes? The one idea which has lately been often spoken of as an important discovery of Du Bois-Reymond's—[the idea which had already been anticipated by Leibnitz, that the "innate ideas,"—intuitions a priori—have originated by transmission from primordial experience, i.e., empirical, a posteriori convictions], was distinctly enunciated by me long before Du Bois-Reymond ...
— Freedom in Science and Teaching. - from the German of Ernst Haeckel • Ernst Haeckel
... Raymond Brucker, who died shortly after Delsarte, being lessened, and conscientious and patient study having fed the flame in that vast brain, we might have obtained affirmations of a new order. And Delsarte might have met with thinkers like Leibnitz, Descartes and Jean Reynaud, on that height where religion is purged of superstition and fanaticism, philosophy set free from atheism ...
— Delsarte System of Oratory • Various
... a struggle against the existing political institutions and against the existing religion and theology, but equally an open and outspoken campaign against all metaphysics, especially that of Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibnitz. Metaphysics was confronted with philosophy, just as Feuerbach, in his first decisive stand against Hegel, opposed sober philosophy to drunken speculation. The metaphysics of the seventeenth century, which was driven from the field by the French Enlightenment, ...
— Selected Essays • Karl Marx
... contriving most ingenious machines, and when he began his researches in optics he was able himself to grind the lenses for his instruments, and himself to make the well-known telescope, which, for its time, was a fine piece of workmanship. Leibnitz was fond of inventing machines: windmills and carriages to be moved without horses preoccupied his mind as much as mathematical and philosophical speculations. Linnaeus became a botanist while helping his father—a practical gardener—in his daily work. In short, with our great ...
— Mother Earth, Vol. 1 No. 4, June 1906 - Monthly Magazine Devoted to Social Science and Literature • Various
... has adhered, from the time of its formation, to a curious notion, its favorite superstition, which may be expressed somewhat as follows: "Human reason and good sense were first invented from thirty to fifty years ago." "When we consider," says Voltaire, "that Newton, Locke, Clarke and Leibnitz, would have been persecuted in France, imprisoned at Rome, burnt at Lisbon, what must we think of human reason? It was born in England within this century." [Footnote: Voltaire (Geneva ed. 1771) xv. 99 (Newton). Also (Beuchot's ed.) xv. 351 (Essai ...
— The Eve of the French Revolution • Edward J. Lowell
... conception here formed of it, has no concern with the nature of the act of judging or believing; the consideration of that act, as a phenomenon of the mind, belongs to another science. Philosophers, however, from Descartes downward, and especially from the era of Leibnitz and Locke, have by no means observed this distinction; and would have treated with great disrespect any attempt to analyze the import of Propositions, unless founded on an analysis of the act of Judgment. A ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... with pomp and regal splendor will dissipate his grief; and if nothing is wanting, nothing fails in the august and beautiful ceremony, he will be entirely comforted.' [Footnote: Thiebault.] He was only great in little things, and therefore when Sophia Charlotte received from her friend Leibnitz his memoir 'On the Power of Small Things,' she said, smiling: 'Leibnitz will teach me to know small things; has he forgotten that I am the wife of Frederick the First, or does he think that I do not know my ...
— Berlin and Sans-Souci • Louise Muhlbach
... rule. One who in many regions of human knowledge anticipated the discoveries of later times, said well a century and a half ago, 'Many etymologies are true, which at the first blush are not probable'; [Footnote: Leibnitz (Opp. vol. v. p. 61): Saepe fit ut etymologiae verae sint, quae primo aspectu verisimiles non sunt.] and, as he might have added, many appear probable, which are not true. This being so, it is our wisdom ...
— On the Study of Words • Richard C Trench
... b. at Norwich, was ed. at Camb., where he became the friend and disciple of Newton, whose System of the Universe he afterwards defended against Leibnitz. In 1704-5 he delivered the Boyle lectures, taking for his subject, The Being and Attributes of God, and assuming an intermediate position between orthodoxy and Deism. In 1712 he pub. views on the doctrine of the Trinity which involved him in ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... It had been believed by Luther, it had been believed by Knox. It was believed at that moment by Oliver Cromwell as completely as by Bunyan himself. It was believed, so far as such a person could be said to believe anything, by the all accomplished Leibnitz himself. Few educated people use the language of it now. In them it was a fire from heaven shining like a sun in a dark world. With us the fire has gone out; in the place of it we have but smoke and ashes, and the Evangelical ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... means that the tidal wave of spiritual evolution is passing through that arc of its circuit. The "Monadic Essence" begins to imperceptibly differentiate in the vegetable kingdom. As the monads are uncompounded things, as correctly defined by Leibnitz, it is the spiritual essence which vivifies them in their degrees of differentiation which constitutes properly the monad—not the atomic aggregation which is only the vehicle and the substance through which thrill the lower and higher degrees ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... extraordinary works of such mystic writers as Swedenborg, Saint-Martin, etc., who have studied the relations of science with the infinite, and the writings of the finest geniuses in natural history, such as Leibnitz, Buffon, Charles Bonnet, etc., one finds in the monads of Leibnitz, in the organic molecules of Buffon, in the vegetative force of Needham, in the jointing of similar parts of Charles Bonnet—who was bold enough ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... than a generation is the philosopher Leibnitz, who after deepening and intensifying the opposition between mind and matter, reunites them by his preconcerted harmony (compare again Phaedrus). To him all the particles of matter are living beings which reflect on one another, and in the least of them the whole is contained. Here we catch a reminiscence ...
— Meno • Plato
... progress is intellectual, moral, and religious. Science is not material. It is the product of intellect and will; and the great founders of modern science, Copernicus, Kepler, Bacon, Descartes, Galileo, Newton, Leibnitz, Ampere, Liebig, Fresnel, Faraday, and Mayer, were Christians. "However paradoxical it may sound," says DuBois-Reymond, "modern science owes its ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... opinion of the great Leibnitz, (uvres de Fontenelle, tom. v. p. 458,) a master of the history of the middle ages. I shall only instance the pedigree of the Carmelites, and the flight of the house of Loretto, which were ...
— The History of The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire - Volume 6 • Edward Gibbon
... entertainment, of which half a dozen proposed titles had been scratched out, and there was finally left 'Tarquin the Optimist, or the Temple of Destiny.' It was from an old story begun by Laurentius Valla, and continued by Leibnitz;—she read, ...
— Helen • Maria Edgeworth
... those wily priests, the Brahmans. I remember too how, when I was at school at Leipzig (and a very good school it was, with such masters as Nobbe, Forbiger, Funkhaenel, and Palm—an old school too, which could boast of Leibnitz among its former pupils) I remember, I say, one of our masters (Dr. Klee) telling us one afternoon, when it was too hot to do any serious work, that there was a language spoken in India, which was much the same as Greek ...
— India: What can it teach us? - A Course of Lectures Delivered before the University Of Cambridge • F. Max Mueller
... who have wrought strongly upon opinion or practice in science, Aristotle, Plato, Ptolemy, Euclid, Archimedes, Roger Bacon, Copernicus, Francis Bacon, Ramus, Tycho Brahe, Galileo, Napier, Descartes, Leibnitz, Newton, Locke. I take none but names known out of their {6} fields of work; and all were learned as well as sagacious. I have chosen my instances: if any one will undertake to show a person of little or no knowledge who has established himself in a great matter of pure thought, ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... commonly address remarks like the above, allowing him to take a certain share in the conversation, so far as assent or pertinent questions are involved. He abused his liberty on this occasion by presuming to say that Leibnitz had the same observation.—No, sir, I replied, he has not. But he said a mighty good thing about mathematics, that sounds something like it, and you found it, not in the original, but quoted by Dr. Thomas Reid. ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. I, No. 1, Nov. 1857 • Various
... Newton and of Leibnitz, sharing therefore in the intellectual activity of the remarkable age which witnessed the birth of modern physical science, Benoit de Maillet spent a long life as a consular agent of the French Government in various Mediterranean ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... originally known as "resultants," a name applied to them by Pierre Simon Laplace, but now replaced by the title "determinants," a name first applied to certain forms of them by Carl Friedrich Gauss. The germ of the theory of determinants is to be found in the writings of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibnitz (1693), who incidentally discovered certain properties when reducing the eliminant of a system of linear equations. Gabriel Cramer, in a note to his Analyse des lignes courbes algebriques (1750), gave the rule which establishes ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 3 - "Destructors" to "Diameter" • Various
... indolence, they deny themselves enervating pleasures, or indulge only to a fixed limit proportioned to their powers. This explains the life of such men as Walter Scott, Cuvier, Voltaire, Newton, Buffon, Bayle, Bossuet, Leibnitz, Lopez de Vega, Calderon, Boccacio, Aretino, Aristotle—in short, every man who delighted, governed, ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... profoundly to be thus taken in; he must, he supposes, (and our beardless philosopher sighs as he says it) bear the penalty of a too restless intellect, and a too speculative genius; he knows all the usual arguments which satisfied Pascal, Butler, Bacon, Leibnitz; but they will do no longer: more radical, more tremendous difficulties have suggested themselves, 'from the 'depths of philosophy,' and far different answers are ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... mysel'," which in March, 1893, Punch republished, adapting it, however, to modern literature—the speaker quaintly including George Eliot amongst our deceased "best men." More recently a precisely parallel anecdote has been attributed to Dr. McCosh, apropos of Leibnitz's theory of evil ("Westminster Gazette," January, 1895). And again, there is an old story of Baron Rothschild, who when very busy received the visit of a business acquaintance. "Take a chair," quoth the Baron. "Can't," said ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... publish, and not for the purpose of detracting from the merit of those who, without having seen anything that I have written, may be found to have treated of like matters: as has in fact occurred to two eminent Geometricians, Messieurs Newton and Leibnitz, with respect to the Problem of the figure of glasses for collecting rays when one of ...
— Treatise on Light • Christiaan Huygens
... reminds him of such good, whether it remind him by arbitrary association, by typical resemblance, or by awakening intuitions of the divine attributes, which he was created to glorify and to enjoy eternally. Leibnitz says: ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... eloquence which defended the sisters of Port Royal—the intellectual hardihood which was not beaten down even by Papal authority—might have raised him to the Patriarchate of the Philosophical Church. It was long disputed whether the honour of inventing the method of Fluxions belonged to Newton or to Leibnitz. It is now generally allowed that these great men made the same discovery at the same time. Mathematical science, indeed, had then reached such a point that, if neither of them had ever existed, the principle must inevitably have occurred to some person within a few years. So in our ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... which I can hope fully to answer within these pages, but it cannot be altogether passed over; we must know something of the nature of music, must have some clear notion of what it is if we are to understand its relation to language in the drama. The explanation given by Leibnitz that it is an exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi is quite inadequate. Music is not a purely intellectual affection like that of number and proportion, but is in the highest degree emotional. The pleasure which we receive from contemplating ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... of Leibnitz 2. Christian Wolff 3. The Illumination as Scientific and as Popular Philosophy ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... calls comprehensiveness; the mental decrepitude it occasions he dignifies with the appellation of repose; and, on the strength of comprehensiveness and repose, is of course qualified to take his seat beside Shakspeare, and chat cosily with Bacon, and wink knowingly at Goethe, and startle Leibnitz with a slap on the shoulder,—the true Red-Republican sign of liberty in manners, equality in power, and fraternity in ideas! These men, to be sure, have a way of saying things which he has not yet caught; but then their wide-reaching thoughts are his as well as theirs. ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... manners and social life of the princes at the German Diets, a picture from the XVIth Century, the sequel of a memoir by Guhrauer on Elizabeth, Abbess of Herford, a friend of William Penn, and a correspondent of Malebranche, Leibnitz and Descartes, ...
— The International Monthly, Volume 3, No. 2, May, 1851 • Various
... without losing an obole of it, the heritage of the Greek Sophists. They involve in fact in the same proscription Socrates and Jesus Christ, Paul of Tarsus and Plato of Athens: they have no more respect for the opinions of Descartes and Leibnitz than for those of Pascal and Bossuet. The great question of the day is to know whether our desire of truth is a chimaera; whether our effort to reach the divine world is a spring into the empty void. ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... hen's throat with the most heartfelt satisfaction, as he grinned and exclaimed, by way of answer to its screams, "Poor feller! I guess I wouldn't hurt you for de world;" I could not help thinking with Leibnitz, that most sapient of philosophers, that this is the best of ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... According to Leibnitz, everything that exists is replete with life, full of vital activity, if not an actual mass of living individualities. But this daring hypothesis has ceased to attract the attention it once received. ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... difference between men except the clearness with which they apprehend, and the logical account they can render to themselves, of this instinctive belief. Spontaneous intuition, says Cousin, is the genius of all men; reflection the genius of few men. "But Leibnitz had no more confidence in the principle of causality, and even in his favorite principle of sufficient reason, than the most ignorant of men;" the latter have this principle within them, as a law of thought, controlling their ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... were "hospitably received and educated, and furnished with books without fee or reward." Even at the present moment, the Irish or Celtic tongue is the only key to her remote antiquities and ancient nomenclature. The distinguished Lhuyd, in his Archaelogia Britannica, and the celebrated Leibnitz himself, place this latter beyond any possible shadow of doubt. Scarcely a ruined fane or classic pile of any remote date within her borders but is identified with the name of some eminent Irish missionary long since passed away. ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... again, and wrung from Pascal the famous outcry of despair in which the French language rose, perhaps for the last time, to the grand style of the twelfth century. To the twelfth century it belongs; to the century of faith and simplicity; not to the mathematical certainties of Descartes and Leibnitz and Newton, or to the mathematical abstractions of Spinoza. Descartes had proclaimed his famous conceptual proof of God: 'I am conscious of myself, and must exist; I am conscious of God and He must exist.' Pascal wearily replied that it was not God he doubted, but logic. He was tortured by the ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... the Tortoise.—Where is the paradox of "Achilles and the Tortoise" to be found? Leibnitz is said to have given it solution in some ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 40, Saturday, August 3, 1850 - A Medium Of Inter-Communication For Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, • Various
... phenomena. No serious advance could be made in the application of algebraic language to the expression of physical phenomena until it could be so extended as to express variation in quantities, as well as the quantities themselves. This extension, worked out independently by Newton and Leibnitz, may be classed as the most fruitful of conceptions in exact science. With it the way was opened for the unimpeded and continually accelerated progress of ...
— Side-lights on Astronomy and Kindred Fields of Popular Science • Simon Newcomb
... rather as a clever paradox. Francis Sanchez, on the other hand, formulated a tenable theory of the impossibility of knowing anything. A riper theory of perception, following Paracelsus and anticipating Leibnitz, was that of Edward Digby, based on the notion of the active correspondence ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... preferred the study of the new sciences to a life of ease at court. Harvey was a physician and demonstrator of anatomy in London. Sydenham, the English Hippocrates, was a pensioner of Cromwell and a physician in Westminster. The German mathematical scholar, Leibnitz, who jointly with Newton discovered the calculus, scorned a university professorship and remained an attache of a German court. Newton, though for a time a professor at Cambridge, during most of his mature life held the ...
— THE HISTORY OF EDUCATION • ELLWOOD P. CUBBERLEY
... details of that portion of the moon turned towards the earth. Mountains, valleys, craters, peaks, watersheds, were depicted on it in their exact dimensions, faithful positions, and names, from Mounts Doerfel and Leibnitz, whose highest summits rise on the eastern side of the disc, to the Mare Frigoris, which extends ...
— The Moon-Voyage • Jules Verne
... revolve within the limits of one system, but that of comets (according to the theory of some speculators)—to connect different systems together. No doubt there is much truth in this: a few Leibnitzes in every age would be of much use: but neither are many men fitted by nature for the part of Leibnitz; nor would the aspect of knowledge be better, if they were. We should then have a state of Grecian life amongst us in which every man individually would attain in a moderate degree all the purposes of the sane understanding,—but ...
— The Notebook of an English Opium-Eater • Thomas de Quincey
... relations in an atom, and it is itself material." The early Buddhist philosophers also taught that physical elements are among the five "skandas" which constitute the phenomenal soul. Democritus and Lucretius regarded the mind as atomic, and the primal "monad" of Leibnitz was the living germ—smallest of things—which enters into all visible and invisible creations, and which is itself all-potential; it is a living microcosm; it is an immortal soul. These various theories are not parallels, ...
— Oriental Religions and Christianity • Frank F. Ellinwood
... anything which had belonged to Newton, and he told me they had one letter only,—from Newton to Leibnitz,—which he showed me. It was written in Latin, with diagrams and formulae interspersed. The reply of Leibnitz, copied by Newton, was also in their collection, and an order from Newton written while he was ...
— Maria Mitchell: Life, Letters, and Journals • Maria Mitchell
... forgotten that on former occasions very confident judgments have been pronounced by very competent persons, which have not been finally ratified. Of the two great minds of the seventeenth century, Newton and Leibnitz, both profoundly religious as well as philosophical, one produced the theory of gravitation, the other objected to that theory that it was subversive of natural religion. The nebular hypothesis—a natural consequence of the theory of gravitation and ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... equally marked of difference. We see their differences most strikingly in their descendants. From Bacon lineally descended Hobbes, Locke, Diderot, D'Alembert, Condillac, Cabanis, and our Scotch school. From Descartes descended Spinoza, Malebranche, Leibnitz, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. The inductive method predominated in one school, the deductive in the other. These differences we shall recognize more fully later on; at present we may fix our minds on the two great ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, Volume 11 • Various
... phenomena of epilepsy, which have already been described in detail in this work, in the part treating of the connection between epilepsy and crime. While writing his poems, Tasso appeared to be out of his senses; Alfieri felt everything go dark around him; Lagrange's pulse became irregular; Milton, Leibnitz, Cujas, Rossini, and Thomas could work only under special conditions. Others have encouraged inspiration by using those stimulants which provoke epileptic attacks. Baudelaire made use of hashish; and wine evoked ...
— Criminal Man - According to the Classification of Cesare Lombroso • Gina Lombroso-Ferrero
... conservation of force, so ably illustrated by Mr. Grove, Dr. Carpenter, and Mr. Faraday. This idea is no novelty, though it seems so at first sight. It was maintained and disputed among the giants of philosophy. Des Cartes and Leibnitz denied that any new motion originated in nature, or that any ever ceased to exist; all motion being in a circle, passing from one body to another, one losing what the other gained. Newton, on the other hand, believed that new motions ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... (3) intervention of transitional forms, and (4) with modifications dependent upon surrounding conditions. Ancient writers occasionally seemed to have a glimmering knowledge of the fact of progress in nature, but as a theory "evolution" belongs to the enlightenment of the nineteenth century. Leibnitz, in the latter part of the seventeenth century first uttered the opinion that the earth was once in a fluid condition and Kant about the middle of the eighteenth century, definitely propounded the nebular hypothesis, which was enlarged as a theory by the Herschels. The first writer ...
— The Handy Cyclopedia of Things Worth Knowing - A Manual of Ready Reference • Joseph Triemens
... at my mentioning Echard's he gave a bounce, not unlike the going off of a squib, and was departing from me, when I begged him to satisfy my curiosity in one point—whether he was really superstitious or no? For I had always believed he was till Mr. Leibnitz had assured me to the contrary. He answered sullenly, "Doth Mr. Leibnitz know my mind better than myself?" ...
— From This World to the Next • Henry Fielding
... suggestions Diderot not always above literary trifling No taste for barren erudition On Montaigne and Bayle Occasional bursts of moralising Varying attitude as to theology The practical arts Second-hand sources Inconsistencies Treatment of metaphysics On Spinosa On Leibnitz On Liberty Astonishing self-contradiction Political articles On the mechanism of government ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... support of the nation. But in despotic countries, the favor even of the most enlightened sovereign is dangerous. Germany never had a more enlightened king than Frederick the Great; and yet, when he speaks of the Queen receiving Leibnitz at court, he says, "She believed that it was not unworthy of a queen to show honor to a philosopher; and as those who have received from heaven a privileged soul rise to the level of sovereigns, she admitted Leibnitz into her ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... with a number and with Leibnitz, too, who was also convinced that no one thinks from himself, but from others, nor do these think from themselves, but all think by an influx from heaven, and heaven by an influx from the Lord. Some, ...
— Angelic Wisdom about Divine Providence • Emanuel Swedenborg
... Spinoza; a doctrine of pure repellent substance—substance "in vacuo," to be lost in which, however, would be the proper consummation of the transitory individual life. Spinoza's own absolutely colourless existence was a practical comment upon it. Descartes; Malebranche, under the monk's cowl again; Leibnitz; Berkeley with his theory of the "Vision of all things in God"; do but present variations on the same theme through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. By one and all it is assumed, in the words ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... animal that dreams; and he and the elephant the only animals that understand looks; the elephant is the only animal that, besides man, feels ennui; the dog, the only quadruped that has been brought to speak. Leibnitz bears witness to a hound in Saxony, that could ...
— The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction - Volume 12, No. 339, Saturday, November 8, 1828. • Various
... possibility and desirableness of a universal language, scientifically constituted; a common form of speech for all the nations of mankind; for the remedy of the confusion and the great evil of Babel, is not wholly new. The celebrated Leibnitz entertained it. It was, we believe, glanced at among the schemes of Lord Monboddo. Bishop Wilkins devoted years of labor to the accomplishment of the task, and thought he had accomplished it. He published the results of his labors in heavy volumes, which have remained, as useless ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... distinguishing the verbs from the nouns, the numbers, tenses, and cases, as properly expressed in their own language as it was written in English.' Such a system was composed by the Bishop Wilkins already referred to; Bacon had busied himself with a 'pasigraphy' long before; Leibnitz, Dalgaru, Frischius, Athanasius Kircher, Pere Besnier, and some twenty others have done the same. The most practical solution of the problem seems to have been that of John Joachim Becher, who in 1661 published a Latin ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... The celebrated Leibnitz related to the French Academy an account of a dog he had seen which was taught to speak, and could call in an intelligible manner for tea, ...
— Anecdotes of Dogs • Edward Jesse
... increasing density and volume of the planets in proportion with their increase of distance from the Sun, which is described as the densest of all the heavenly bodies; in the 'Epitome Astran. Copern. in' vii. 'libros digesta', 1618-1622, p. 420. Leibnitz also inclined to the opinions of Kepler and Otto von Guericke, that the planets increase in volume in proportion to their increase of distance from the Sun. See his letter to the Magdeburg Burgomaster (Mayence, 1671), in Leibnitz, ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... with a comment that suggested, from the ills of life, the absence of divine care in the shaping of the world. Doubt was born of the corruption of society; Nature and Man were said to be against faith in the rule of a God, wise, just, and merciful. In 1710, after Bayle's death, Leibnitz, a German philosopher then resident in Paris, wrote in French a book, with a title formed from Greek words meaning Justice of God, Theodicee, in which he met Bayle's argument by reasoning that what we cannot understand ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... that to turn out his little lenses as perfectly as possible was as essential a part of his life as that philosophical activity which alone interested them. That his prowess as an optician should be invoked by Herr Leibnitz gave him a gratification which his fame as a philosopher could never evoke. The only alloy was that he could not understand what Leibnitz wanted. "That rays from points outside the optic axis may be united exactly in the same ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... huge pile of learning, unwieldly, enormous) and in Lord Brook's hieroglyphic theories, and in Bishop Butler's Sermons, and in the Duchess of Newcastle's fantastic folios, and in Clarke and South and Tillotson, and all the fine thinkers and masculine reasoners of that age—and Leibnitz's Pre-established Harmony reared its arch above his head, like the rainbow in the cloud, covenanting with the hopes of man—and then he fell plump, ten thousand fathoms down (but his wings saved him harmless) into the hortus siccus of ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... nonsensical notion of the Arabian kismet, that from the beginning of time every event was fore-arranged as in a fairy tale, and that all which is, is simply the acting out of a libretto written before the play began—a belief revived in the last century by readers of Leibnitz, who were truer than the great German himself to the consequences of his doctrine, which he simply evaded.[15] In coupling this humiliating and superstitious means of evading moral accountability with the same principle as derived from feudal devotion, Scott, consciously or unconsciously, ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... the system of Aquinas to show wherein he agrees or disagrees with Maimonides, nor is it possible to do more than mention the fact that after Aquinas also, Duns Scotus, the head of the Franciscan school, had the "Guide" before him, and in comparatively modern times, such celebrities as Scaliger and Leibnitz speak of the Jewish philosopher with admiration ...
— A History of Mediaeval Jewish Philosophy • Isaac Husik
... the mother to the child. It is the mother who loves, because she has suffered. And this seems to be the great law of love. Not a triumph in art, literature, or jurisprudence—from the story of Homer to the odes of Horace, from the times of Bacon and Leibnitz to the days of Tyndall and Morse—that has not been obtained by toil and suffering! The mother of Anderson, having suffered so much in her loneliness and want, knew how to train her boy,—the joy of her life. And he in return knew how to appreciate a mother's love. He remembered that to ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... our own metaphysicians! "Lo! the Nominalists and the Realists again!" exclaimed my learned friend, Sharon Turner, alluding to our modern doctrines on abstract ideas, on which there is still a doubt whether they are anything more than generalising terms.[42] Leibnitz confused his philosophy by the term sufficient reason: for every existence, for every event, and for every truth there must be a sufficient reason. This vagueness of language produced a perpetual misconception, and Leibnitz was proud ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... and the Panther" with really Catholic poems like Southwell's "Burning Babe" and Crashaw's "Flaming Heart," or even with Newman's "Dream of Gerontius." In his "Essay on Man," Pope versified, without well understanding, the optimistic deism of Leibnitz, as expounded by Shaftesbury and Bolingbroke. The Anglican Church itself was in a strange condition, when Jonathan Swift, a dean and would-be bishop, came to its defense with his "Tale of a Tub" and his ironical ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... poetry and arts, was an intellectual rather than a moral flaw; but in the implied assertion, "what I can't do is not worth doing," we have to regret the influence of an enormous egotism stunting enormous powers, which, beginning with his student days, possessed him to the last. The fame of Newton, Leibnitz, Gibbon, whose works he came to regard as the spoon-meat of his "rude untutored youth," is beyond the range of his or of any shafts. When he trod on Mazzini's pure patriot career, as a "rose-water imbecility," ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... in the sixteenth century prepared the way for Locke, Newton and Leibnitz; and his system, although now little used, was really the foundation of what followed. He is said to have given new and fresher impulse to mathematical and philosophical study than any other ...
— The Interdependence of Literature • Georgina Pell Curtis
... kinds of animals which are met with in nature, will lead us, not in one straight series, but by many roads, step by step, gradation by gradation, from man, at the summit, to specks of animated jelly at the bottom of the series. 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 ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... the belief, and are pained by its being questioned. But, surely, it is not legitimate to assume that, in the order of the universe, whatever is desirable is true. Optimism, even when a God is already believed in, is a thorny doctrine to maintain, and had to be taken by Leibnitz in the limited sense, that the universe being made by a good being, is the best universe possible, not the best absolutely: that the Divine power, in short, was not equal to making it more free from ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... are far from despising it; on the contrary, they hold it in honour, if they are clear-sighted; but they shrink from devoting themselves to it, for fear of using a razor, as is said, to cut stones. "I have no mind," wrote Leibnitz to Basnage, who had exhorted him to compile an immense Corpus of unpublished and printed documents relating to the history of the law of nations; "I have no mind to turn transcriber.... Does it not occur to you that the advice you give me resembles that of a man who ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... published this very treatise, which seemed to condemn that life of study and privacy to which they were both equally attached; and confesses that the whole must be considered as a mere sportive effusion, requesting that Cowley would not suppose its principles formed his private opinions. Thus LEIBNITZ, we are told, laughed at the fanciful system revealed in his Theodicee, and acknowledged that he never wrote it in earnest; that a philosopher is not always obliged to write seriously, and that to invent an hypothesis is only a proof of the force ...
— Literary Character of Men of Genius - Drawn from Their Own Feelings and Confessions • Isaac D'Israeli
... Bible, large and handsome, which belonged to Lord Lumley (d. 1609), and also a copy of Gervase of Tilbury (that from which the text was first printed by Leibnitz) from the library of St. Augustine of Canterbury. There, too, are many MSS. collected by Flacius Illyricus, who made purchases in England. He printed many of the rhyming Latin poems attributed to Walter Map; for a good many his edition is the only authority, his MSS. having ...
— The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts - Helps for Students of History, No. 17. • M. R. James
... Churches are in expectation of something to be done which may make for union and peace." When a temper so cold as Tenison's could kindle in this fashion it is no wonder that more enthusiastic minds launched into loftier expectations—that Leibnitz hoped to see the union of Calvinist and Lutheran accomplished by a common adoption of the English Liturgy, that a High Churchman like Nicholls revived the plan, which Cranmer had proposed and Calvin had supported, of a general council of Protestants to be held in England. One by one such visions ...
— Stray Studies from England and Italy • John Richard Green
... he often seemed churlish. In his intercourse with the world in general he appeared ignorant or negligent of those arts which double the value of a favour and take away the sting of a refusal. He was little interested in letters or science. The discoveries of Newton and Leibnitz, the poems of Dryden and Boileau, were unknown to him. Dramatic performances tired him; and he was glad to turn away from the stage and to talk about public affairs, while Orestes was raving, or while Tartuffe was pressing ...
— The History of England from the Accession of James II. - Volume 2 (of 5) • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... apostolical and true ecclesiastical form of government. Later in the year, Jablonski placed in the hands of Baron Prinz his more matured 'Project for introducing Episcopacy into the King of Prussia's dominions.' Leibnitz engaged to interest the Electress of Hanover in the proposal. He was afraid, however, that the thirty-nine articles would be considered 'a little too much Geneva stamp' at Berlin. The negotiations continued, but the interest of the King had ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... one man's wisdom overrode the crowd. It was impossible to say even this,—that Hegel's success was the result of the symmetry of this theory. There were other equally symmetrical theories,—those of Descartes, Leibnitz, Fichte, Schopenhauer. There was but one reason why this doctrine won for itself, for a season, the belief of the whole world; and this reason was, that the deductions of that philosophy winked at people's weaknesses. These ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... of German literature in its modern form began early in the eighteenth century. Leibnitz wrote in Latin and French, and his culture was mainly French. His follower, Christian Wolf, however, first used the German language for philosophical writing. But in poetry, Klopstock and Wieland, and, in serious prose, Lessing and Herder, led the way to the ...
— German Culture Past and Present • Ernest Belfort Bax
... of the greatest and most far-reaching scientific discoveries have been nothing else than a few correct definitions, a few just concepts and a few true propositions. Such, for example, was the work of Euclid, Newton and Leibnitz—a few correct definitions, a few just concepts, a few true propositions; but these have been extended and multiplied, sometimes by men of creative genius, and often almost automatically by men of merely ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... popularization he has not his equal in the world. Without departing from the usual conversational tone, and as if in sport, he puts into little portable phrases the greatest discoveries and hypotheses of the human mind, the theories of Descartes, Malebranche, Leibnitz, Locke and Newton, the diverse religions of antiquity and of modern times, every known system of physics, physiology, geology, morality, natural law, and political economy,[4121] in short, all the generalized conceptions in every order of knowledge to which ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 1 (of 6) - The Ancient Regime • Hippolyte A. Taine
... scientific experiments. At least three of these men were of sufficient importance in the history of the development of science to demand more than passing notice. These three are the Englishman Francis Bacon (1561-1626), the Frenchman Rene Descartes (1596-1650); and the German Gottfried Leibnitz (1646-1716). Bacon, as the earliest path-breaker, showed the way, theoretically at least, in which the sciences should be studied; Descartes, pursuing the methods pointed out by Bacon, carried the same line of abstract reason into practice as well; while Leibnitz, coming some ...
— A History of Science, Volume 2(of 5) • Henry Smith Williams
... occupy himself for half an hour on any one matter, especially if following the ideas of another person.[94] He began his morning's work, after an hour or two of dispersive chat, with the Port-Royal Logic, Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding, Malebranche, Leibnitz, Descartes.[95] He found these authors in a condition of such perpetual contradiction among themselves, that he formed the chimerical design of reconciling them with one another. This was tedious, ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... it produced quite the reverse effect, detaching her from it for ever. After reading and enjoying Chateaubriand's book she set to work on the philosophers and essayists Mably, Locke, Condillac, Montesquieu, Bacon, Bossuet, Aristotle, Leibnitz, Pascal, Montaigne, and then turned to the poets and moralists La Bruyere, Pope, Milton, Dante, Virgil, Shakespeare, &c. But she was not a metaphysician; the tendencies of her mind did not impel ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... have been called in to analyze, define, demonstrate, and generalize." [Footnote: Cleghorn, Ancient and Modern Art, vol. i. p. 67.] Great writers have written ingenious treatises, like Burke, Alison, and Stewart. Beauty, according to Plato, is the contemplation of mind; Leibnitz maintained it consists in perfection; Diderot referred beauty to the idea of relation; Blondel asserted it was harmonic proportions; Peter Leigh speaks of it as the music of the eye. Yet everybody understands ...
— The Old Roman World • John Lord
... problem of the essence or origin of life. Who can explain what is the essence of the attraction of gravity? No one now objects to following out the results consequent on this unknown element of attraction; notwithstanding that Leibnitz formerly accused Newton of introducing "occult qualities ...
— On the Origin of Species - 6th Edition • Charles Darwin
... Rome, to the great horror of the Pope and his prelates in the Old World and in the New. De Morgan's pithy account of him will interest the company: "Giordano Bruno was all paradox. He was, as has been said, a vorticist before Descartes, an optimist before Leibnitz, a Copernican before Galileo. It would be easy to collect a hundred strange opinions of his. He was born about 1550, and was roasted alive at Rome, February 17, 1600, for the maintenance and defence of the Holy Church, and the rights ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... Remusat looks at his attempt, with its success and failure, as characteristic of English, massive, practical good sense rather than as marked by real philosophical depth and refinement, such as Continental thinkers point to and are proud of in Descartes and Leibnitz. It is not even that a competent master of the whole domain of knowledge, Whewell, filled with the deepest sense of all that the world owes to Bacon, takes for granted that "though Bacon's general maxims are sagacious and animating, his particular precepts failed ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... remarks, for it made me so happy to see them so happy. But generally their conversation would branch out on philosophical subjects, when my brother WILLIAM and my father often argued with such warmth that my mother's interference became necessary, when the names LEIBNITZ, NEWTON, and EULER sounded rather too loud for the repose of her little ones, who ought to be in school by seven in the morning. But it seems that on the brothers retiring to their own room, where ...
— Sir William Herschel: His Life and Works • Edward Singleton Holden
... Gautier's laudatory phrase, and is as "flamboyant" as one could desire. To understand the march of feeling in French literature, and to measure the growth and expansion in criticism, we need only compare Diderot's eloge on Richardson with Fontenelle's eloge on Dangeau or Leibnitz. The exaggerations of phrase, the violences of feeling, the broken apostrophes, give to Diderot's eloge an unpleasant tone of declamation. Some of us may still prefer the moderation, the subtlety, the nice discrimination, of the critics of another school. Still it would be ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... it were done with more knowledge than is shown by Lord Shaftesbury, will usually be kicked and spurned in his turn; and accordingly it has been often remarked, that the Characteristics are unjustly neglected in our days. For Lord Shaftesbury, with all his pedantry, was a man of great talents. Leibnitz had the sagacity to see this through the ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... over a one-sided record is somewhat abated. Only the imperial replies are preserved. But, as we have said, Caius Plinius Caecilius Secundus (nephew to the ponderously fat and still more ponderously learned C. Plinius Secundus, who, like Leibnitz in latter times, sat, wrote, was read to, slept, and ate in his arm-chair for days together) must have enjoyed living. If he had not had so gentle a disposition and so loving a recollection of his uncle, we might ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... dedicated to him under the title of the "Essay on Man," a work which has this in common with the earlier "Essay on Criticism," that it is a versification of a given theme. But Pope understood the precepts of Rapin and Bossu better than the precepts of Leibnitz and St. John, and the "Essay on Man," bristling as it does with axiomatic felicities and "jewels five words long," has long been discredited as a philosophical treatise. It is to another hint from the sage of Dawley ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... has a fairly good opinion of one's self; but why do you take it so very, very seriously? Did Nietzsche, perchance, spare the Germans? And aren't you accustomed to criticism on the part of German philosophers? Is it not the ancient and time-honoured privilege of the whole range of them from Leibnitz to Hegel — even of German poets, like Goethe and Heine — to call you bad names and to use unkind language towards you? Has there not always been among the few thinking heads in Germany a silent consent and an open contempt for you and your ways; the sort ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... those happy moods which are so precisely the converse of ennui—moods of the keenest appetency, when the film from the mental vision departs—the [Greek phrase]—and the intellect, electrified, surpasses as greatly its every-day condition, as does the vivid yet candid reason of Leibnitz, the mad and flimsy rhetoric of Gorgias. Merely to breathe was enjoyment; and I derived positive pleasure even from many of the legitimate sources of pain. I felt a calm but inquisitive interest in every thing. With a cigar in my mouth and a newspaper ...
— The Works of Edgar Allan Poe - Volume 5 (of 5) of the Raven Edition • Edgar Allan Poe
... a play of the entire nature, and a truthfulness and downrightness, with an amount, and accuracy, and vivification of learning, such as we know of in no one other writer, ancient or modern—not even Leibnitz; and we know no writings which so wholesomely at once exalt and humble the reader, make him feel what is in him, and what he can and may, as well as what he cannot, and need never hope to know. In this respect, Hamilton is as grand as Pascal, and more simple; he exemplifies everywhere his ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... with these extracts the words of Leibnitz: "To despise reason in matters of religion is to my eyes certain proof either of an obstinacy that borders on fanaticism, or, ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... second—that is, ontology— treats most scientifically of being abstracted from all being ("de ente quatenus ens"). It came in fashion whilst Aristotle was in fashion, and has been spun into an immense web out of scholastic brains. But it should be, and I think it is already, left to the acute disciples of Leibnitz, who dug for gold in the ordure of the schools, and to other German wits. Let them darken by tedious definitions what is too plain to need any; or let them employ their vocabulary of barbarous terms to propagate an unintelligible ...
— Letters to Sir William Windham and Mr. Pope • Lord Bolingbroke
... which Turgot and his friends devoured with ardour. Locke, Bayle, Voltaire, Buffon, relieved Clarke, Leibnitz, Spinosa, Cudworth; and constant discussions among themselves both cleared up and enlarged what they read.[11] One of the disputants, certainly not the least amiable, has painted his own part in ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 2 of 3) - Turgot • John Morley
... coincidences suggests an everlasting source of explanations, applicable to all that is extraordinary. The great paradox of coincidence is that of Leibnitz, known as the pre-established harmony, or law of coincidences, by which, separately and independently, the body receives impressions, and the mind proceeds as if it had perceived them from without. Every sensation, and the consequent state ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume II (of II) • Augustus de Morgan
... preachers, teachers, and confessors. That they were characterized, during the first fifty years, by such excellencies, has never been denied. The Jesuit missionary called forth the praises of Baxter, and the panegyric of Leibnitz. He went forth, without fear, to encounter the most dreaded dangers. Martyrdom was nothing to him, for he knew that the altar, which might stream with his blood, would, in after times, be a cherished ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord |
