"Leibnitz" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... 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 ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... Paradise. She cooed, 'Is Mr. Pepys within?' I greatly fear That they denied you to her!" Off ran Pepys! "A hint's a hint," laughed Halley, "and so to bed. But, as for Isaac Newton, let me say, Whatever his embroilments were, he solved With just one hour of thought, not long ago The problem set by Leibnitz as a challenge To all of Europe. He published his result Anonymously, but Leibnitz, when he saw it, Cried out, at once, old enemy as he was, 'That's Newton, none but Newton! From this claw I know the old lion, in ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... one-sided; but still true according to the possibilities of truth when caught from an angular and not a central station. There is even a pleasure as from a gorgeous display, and a use as from a fulness of unity, in reading a grand or even pompous laudatory oration upon a man like Leibnitz, or Newton, which neglects all his errors or blemishes. This abstracting view I could myself adopt as to a man whom I had learned to know from books, but not as to one whom I knew also from personal intercourse. His faults and his greatness are then too much intertwisted. There is still something ...
— The Posthumous Works of Thomas De Quincey, Vol. II (2 vols) • Thomas De Quincey
... 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 of ...
— Plato and Platonism • Walter Horatio Pater
... of 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 ...
— Lectures and Essays • T.H. Huxley
... unselfish affection which afterwards consecrated her whole life. But, generally, their conversation branched out into philosophical subjects; and father and son argued with so much fervour, that the fond mother's interference became necessary,—the immortal names of Leibnitz, Newton, and Euler ringing with a clarion-like peal that boded ill for the repose of the younger members of the family. "But it seems," says Caroline, "that on the brothers retiring to their own room, where they shared the same bed, my brother William had still ...
— The Story of the Herschels • Anonymous
... has been issued that this valuable collection may not be allowed to perish for want of funds, and that it may also be now at length removed to Brunswick, since Wolfenbuttel is entirely deserted as an intellectual centre. No false sentimentality regarding the memory of its former custodians, Leibnitz and Lessing, should hinder this project. Lessing himself would have been the first to urge that the library and its utility should be ...
— Enemies of Books • William Blades
... 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 ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... Europe. 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 mind in search of 'something ...
— Bunyan • James Anthony Froude
... have meditated the things which now I 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 the ...
— Treatise on Light • Christiaan Huygens
... fifteen centuries before it; that it did this good work by boldly observing and analysing facts; that this boldness towards facts increased in proportion as Europe became indoctrinated with the Jewish literature; and that, notably, such men as Kepler, Newton, Berkeley, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Descartes, in whatsoever else they differed, agreed in this, that their attitude towards Nature was derived from the teaching of the Jewish sages. I believe that we are not yet fully aware how much we owe to the ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... Such was the 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
... eager to promote the publication. He considered the foreign philosopher as a man zealous in the cause of religion; and with him he was willing to join against the system of the fatalists, and the doctrine of Leibnitz. It is well known, that Warburton wrote a vindication of Mr. Pope; but there is reason to think, that Johnson conceived an early prejudice against the Essay on Man; and what once took root in a mind like his, was not easily eradicated. His letter ...
— Dr. Johnson's Works: Life, Poems, and Tales, Volume 1 - The Works Of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D., In Nine Volumes • Samuel Johnson
... 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
... conscious of his own worth, and of the 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 ...
— Chips From A German Workshop. Vol. III. • F. Max Mueller
... The Leibnitz Mountains, unfortunately, were not visible, as the sun had set upon them. I, however, mentioned that this range comprises several peaks which are believed to be the highest on the lunar surface, reaching as they do an altitude of 30,000 feet, and, according to some measurements, ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... infinitesimal calculus of Leibnitz will show you that the architecture of the Louvre is less learned than that of a snail: the eternal geometer has unrolled his transcendent spirals on the shell of the mollusc that you, like the vulgar profane, know only seasoned with spinach ...
— Fabre, Poet of Science • Dr. G.V. (C.V.) Legros
... merit of her writers, the social manners of the natives, the influence of the monarchy, and the exile of the protestants. Several foreigners have seized the opportunity of speaking to Europe in this common dialect, and Germany may plead the authority of Leibnitz and Frederick, of the first of her philosophers, and the greatest of her kings. The just pride and laudable prejudice of England has restrained this communication of idioms; and of all the nations on this side of the Alps, ...
— Memoirs of My Life and Writings • Edward Gibbon
... think of anything not subject to sense? Shall we say with Locke that there are two sources of our ideas, sensation and reflection; that the mind cannot know things directly, but only through ideas? Shall we suggest with Leibnitz that reflection is nothing more than attention to what is passing in the mind, and that between the mind and the body there is a sympathetic synchronism? With Berkeley shall we assert that there is no other reason for inferring the existence of matter itself than the necessity of having ...
— History of the Intellectual Development of Europe, Volume I (of 2) - Revised Edition • John William Draper
... THE THEOLOGICAL VIEW. Reason for the Church's ready acceptance of the conclusions of comparative philology Beginnings of a scientific theory of language Hottinger Leibnitz The collections of Catharine the Great, of Hervas, and of Adelung Chaotic period in philology between Leibnitz and the beginning of the study of Sanskrit Illustration from the successive editions ...
— History of the Warfare of Science with Theology in Christendom • Andrew Dickson White
... iniquitous, the Germany of all the unintelligible pedants whose empty lucubrations and microscopic researches have been so unduly vaunted. 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. If we ...
— The European Anarchy • G. Lowes Dickinson
... the whole earth. B. Proofs that the sea has often been changed into dry land and then again into sea. C. A discussion of the various-theories of the earth put forward by Scheuchzer, Moro, Bonnet, Woodward, White, Leibnitz, Linnaeus, and Buffon. ...
— Lay Sermons, Addresses and Reviews • Thomas Henry Huxley
... barbarous[21] as those of Moloch? The frightful absurdity of the legend of a God who revenges himself for the disobedience of one of his creatures by inflicting horrible tortures on his son remained unperceived during many centuries. Such potent geniuses as a Galileo, a Newton, and a Leibnitz never supposed for an instant that the truth of such dogmas could be called in question. Nothing can be more typical than this fact of the hypnotising effect of general beliefs, but at the same time nothing can mark more decisively the ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon
... any language .... 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 folio, which, apart from its main ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol 3 No 3, March 1863 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... natural that they would be received as 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 monument of his fame, and an impressive emblem of the power of his religion. Francis Xavier, ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... 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 ...
— Ridgeway - An Historical Romance of the Fenian Invasion of Canada • Scian Dubh
... entitled Ars Signorum, vulgo character universalis et lingua philosophica, and the other printed at Oxford, 1680, entitled, Didascalocophus, or the Deaf and Dumb Man's Tutor. He spent his life in obscurity, and his works, though he was incidentally mentioned by Leibnitz under the name of "M. Dalgarus," passed into oblivion. Yet he undoubtedly was the precursor of Bishop Wilkins in his Essay toward a Real Character and a Philosophical Language, published in London, ...
— Sign Language Among North American Indians Compared With That Among Other Peoples And Deaf-Mutes • Garrick Mallery
... no 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 conception of the universe, and ...
— Christianity and Greek Philosophy • Benjamin Franklin Cocker
... very reverse; they see too clearly; and fancy that others see as clearly as themselves. Such, without any tincture of confusion, was the obscurity of Kant (though in him there was also a singular defect of the art of communicating knowledge, as he was himself aware); such was the obscurity of Leibnitz (who otherwise was remarkable for his felicity in explaining himself); such, if any, is the obscurity of Ricardo; though, for my own part, I must acknowledge that I could never find any; to me he seems a model of perspicuity. But I believe that the very ground ...
— Memorials and Other Papers • Thomas de Quincey
... of her faith, but 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 her ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... London in 1697, and afterwards into the Academies of Berlin and Paris. His merit was so well known and acknowledged by the Royal Society that they judged him a fit person to decide the famous contest between Newton and G. W. Leibnitz (see INFINITESIMAL CALCULUS). The life of Demoivre was quiet and uneventful. His old age was spent in obscure poverty, his friends and associates having nearly all passed away before him. He died at London, on ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... student lately come among us to whom I 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. I will tell the company what he did ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... and Sir Wm. Thompson, among astronomers, have proclaimed its antagonism to the facts of physical astronomy. No new facts subversive of the foundations of faith in God as recognized in the universe by Bacon, Newton, Boyle, Descartes, Leibnitz, Pascal, Paley and Bell, have been discovered by such scientists as Whewell, Sedgwick, Brewster, Faraday, Hugh Miller, or our American geologists, Dawson, Hitchcock, and Dana. Nor have the deliberate and expanded demonstrations of its unscientific character by the late lamented Agassiz been ...
— Fables of Infidelity and Facts of Faith - Being an Examination of the Evidences of Infidelity • Robert Patterson
... of Fo-shee puzzled even the great philosopher of the country, who declared himself dissatisfied with all the explanations of the commentators. The learned and ingenious Leibnitz fancied he discovered in them a system of binary arithmetic, by which all the operations and results of numbers might be performed, with the help of two figures only, the cypher or zero 0, and an unit 1, the former being considered ...
— Travels in China, Containing Descriptions, Observations, and Comparisons, Made and Collected in the Course of a Short Residence at the Imperial Palace of Yuen-Min-Yuen, and on a Subsequent Journey thr • John Barrow
... contemporaries. Contrast the mere polemics of "The Hind 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 "Argument against ...
— A History of English Romanticism in the Eighteenth Century • Henry A. Beers
... 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 ...
— No and Yes • Mary Baker Eddy
... them, God, as pure spirit, could not act directly upon vile and gross matter. The difficulty which troubled them was curiously analogous to that which disturbed the Cartesians and the followers of Leibnitz in the seventeenth century; how was spirit to act upon matter, without ceasing, pro tanto, to be spirit? To evade this difficulty, the Gnostics postulated a series of emanations from God, becoming successively less and less spiritual and more ...
— The Unseen World and Other Essays • John Fiske
... cling to 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 imperfections than it is. But optimism, ...
— A Candid Examination of Theism • George John Romanes
... Jerome slept with a copy of Aristotle under his pillow; Lord Clarendon had a couple of favourites, Livy and Tacitus; Lord Chatham had a good classical library, with an especial fondness for Barrow; Leibnitz died in a chair with the 'Argenis' of Barclay in his hand; Kant, who never left his birthplace, Koenigsburg, had a weakness in the direction of books of travel. 'Were I to sell my library,' wrote Diderot, 'I would keep ...
— The Book-Hunter in London - Historical and Other Studies of Collectors and Collecting • William Roberts
... which the peculiarity is, that if a person passing over it in a boat utters, in a loud voice, certain opprobrious words, a commotion arises in the waters and sinks the boat. The words, as printed in the edition of Leibnitz (Leibnitii Scriptores Brunsvicenses, tom. i. p. 990.), are "Prout haveringemere aut allethophe cunthefere;" which he explains to mean, "Phrut tibi, mare, et omnibus qui te transfretant." He adds with great simplicity: "Et satis mirandum, quod aquae hujus modi concipiunt ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 184, May 7, 1853 • Various
... perceived him cutting a 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 ...
— A Ramble of Six Thousand Miles through the United States of America • S. A. Ferrall
... 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 ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... whatever, and never hope to know anything, of the steps by which the passage from molecular movement to states of consciousness is effected." Molecules and atoms are objects of knowledge. If we ascribe knowledge to them, they immediately become the monads of Leibnitz; you may evolve out of them what you have first involved into them. Knowledge belongs to the Self alone, call it what we will. The nerve-fibres might vibrate as often as they pleased, millions and millions of times ...
— The Silesian Horseherd - Questions of the Hour • Friedrich Max Mueller
... descriptions of external nature, quite foreign to Sterne, were original with him, and that the episode of the young German lady by the lake of Geneva, with her fevered admiration for Yorick, and the compliments to the German nation and the praise for great Germans, Luther, Leibnitz and Frederick the Great, are to be ascribed to the same source. He did not rid the book of revolting features, as one might suppose from his preface.[93] Previous to the publication of the whole translation, Schink published in the ...
— Laurence Sterne in Germany • Harvey Waterman Thayer
... 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, 'Deutschen Schriften, ...
— COSMOS: A Sketch of the Physical Description of the Universe, Vol. 1 • Alexander von Humboldt
... 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, so he ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... of the 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 ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, No. 5, May, 1864 - Devoted To Literature And National Policy • Various
... 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
... 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 ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. III, No IV, April 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... 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 ...
— Medical Essays • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... of Professor Huxley's dictum, is contributing a good deal to the general doctrine of evolution; for though Descartes and Leibnitz may have thrown out hints pointing more or less broadly in the direction of evolution, some of which Professor Huxley has quoted, he has adduced nothing approaching to the passage from Buffon given above, either in respect of the clearness with which the conclusion ...
— Unconscious Memory • Samuel Butler
... is the paradox of "Achilles and the Tortoise" to be found? Leibnitz is said to have given it solution in some part ...
— Notes & Queries, No. 40, Saturday, August 3, 1850 - A Medium Of Inter-Communication For Literary Men, Artists, Antiquaries, • Various
... know, Leibnitz is the only philosopher (at the same time a man of science, in the modern sense, of the first rank) who has noted that the modern conception of Force, as a sort of atmosphere enveloping the particles of bodies, and having potential ...
— Collected Essays, Volume V - Science and Christian Tradition: Essays • T. H. Huxley
... 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 provides ...
— The Boy With the U.S. Census • Francis Rolt-Wheeler
... III., and which found expression in the works even of as free-minded a writer as La Bruyere. It is during the period of the fiercest struggle between Louis XIV. and William III. that Bossuet carried on with the German philosopher Leibnitz a series of negotiations, the object of which was the return to Catholicism of Protestant Germany. We need hardly state that the negotiations ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... was of special suggestion. But the arguments or topics of the poem are to be traced to books in much vogue at the time; to Shaftesbury's Characteristics (1711), King on the Origin of Evil (1702), and particularly to Leibnitz, ...
— The Age of Pope - (1700-1744) • John Dennis
... senses, and as his contact with his fellow-creatures and with the whole creation is at one or other of those five points, he is necessarily sensuous. Endowed with native intelligence, the intellectus ipse of Leibnitz, he nevertheless receives his impressions on sensitive nerves, his emotions are sentiments, his words become sentences, and his stock of wisdom is his common sense. A few, very few, words express his sensations, a few more his ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... than its own intrinsick merit, the publick will be soon satisfied with it. And I think the Examen should be pushed forward with the utmost expedition. Thus, "This day, &c., An Examen of Mr. Pope's Essay, &c., containing a succinct Account of the Philosophy of Mr. Leibnitz on the System of the Fatalists, with a Confutation of their Opinions, and an Illustration of the Doctrine of Free-will;" [with what else you ...
— Life Of Johnson, Vol. 1 • Boswell, Edited by Birkbeck Hill
... in Germany gave him a firm hold on the language, and a goodly glimpse into the philosophy of Kant, Leibnitz and Schleiermacher. When Coleridge returned to England, he went at once to see his interesting family. Rumor has it that Mrs. Coleridge, in addition to caring for her own little brood and assisting in the Southey ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 5 (of 14) • Elbert Hubbard
... is, it 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 time ...
— Bouvard and Pecuchet - A Tragi-comic Novel of Bourgeois Life • Gustave Flaubert
... (1675-1729).—Divine and metaphysician, 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 trouble, from which ...
— A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature • John W. Cousin
... 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 mists of ...
— Biographical Essays • Thomas de Quincey
... others. Some 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
... Zoroaster, the Tal mud of the Jews, the Old Testament, the Gospel of Christ and his disciples, Plato's works, the Koran of Mohammed, the Edda of Snorro, and so on toward our own day, to Swedenborg, and to the invaluable contributions of Leibnitz, Kant and Hegel—these, with such poems only in which, (while singing well of persons and events, of the passions of man, and the shows of the material universe,) the religious tone, the consciousness ...
— Complete Prose Works - Specimen Days and Collect, November Boughs and Goodbye My Fancy • Walt Whitman
... efforts, which were the more deserving because I had to work alone, led to almost nothing in that congenial calling, I would begin it all over again if I could. I should love to be conversing for the first time with Leibnitz and Newton, with Laplace and Lagrange, with Cuvier and Jussieu, even if I had afterwards to solve that other arduous problem: how to procure one's daily bread. Ah, young men, my successors, what an easy time you have of it today! ...
— The Life of the Fly - With Which are Interspersed Some Chapters of Autobiography • J. Henri Fabre
... be my father's. His lordship put it into my hands, and I showed some pencil notes of my father's writing. Lord Oldborough seemed surprised, and said he did not know this had been among the number of your studies. I told him that you had once been much intent upon Wilkins and Leibnitz's scheme of a universal language, and that I believed this had led you to the art of deciphering. He repeated the words 'Universal language—Ha!—then I suppose it was from Mr. Percy that Commissioner Falconer learnt all he knew on ...
— Tales and Novels, Vol. VII - Patronage • Maria Edgeworth
... science, they introduced proper and reasonable methods of investigation, and by their great ability and distinguished success they have produced a revolution in the intellectual world. Other great men had also appeared, such as Leibnitz and Huyghens; and it became very clear that the methods of investigation which had borne such fruit in the days of Galileo were not disposed of completely by his unwilling recantation; it became very clear that the new civilization ...
— Scientific American Supplement, No. 488, May 9, 1885 • Various
... 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 confuses us, because we see only the parts of a great whole. Bayle, he ...
— Essay on Man - Moral Essays and Satires • Alexander Pope
... power back of our 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 origin ...
— Education and the Higher Life • J. L. Spalding
... reminiscences. As a whole, the aspect of the central portion of the village—of the true Jena—cannot greatly have changed since the days when Luther stopped here on his way to Wittenberg; surely not since 1662, when the mighty young Leibnitz, the Aristotle of Germany, came to Jena to study under Weigel, the most famous of German mathematicians of that century. Here and there an old house has been demolished, to be sure; even now you may see the work of destruction going on, as ...
— A History of Science, Volume 5(of 5) - Aspects Of Recent Science • Henry Smith Williams
... 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 ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... solid claim to glory inasmuch as public opinion is judge, but also those whose influence being confined to a more limited sphere, should be less anxious about obtaining it. It finds so easy an access into the souls of men, that it is said that even Plato was jealous of Socrates, Aristotle of Plato, Leibnitz of Locke, ...
— My Recollections of Lord Byron • Teresa Guiccioli
... right to finality as regards its compulsory lessons. Also as regards physical training. At present it is assumed that the schoolmaster has a right to force every child into an attempt to become Porson and Bentley, Leibnitz and Newton, all rolled into one. This is the tradition of the oldest grammar schools. In our times an even more horrible and cynical claim has been made for the right to drive boys through compulsory games in ...
— A Treatise on Parents and Children • George Bernard Shaw
... selves moments of obscure consciousness when we understand dimly, and moments of luminous consciousness which carry one almost to the very bottom of things. It is difficult to consider those in the wrong who admit, with Leibnitz, the existence of small states of consciousness. The lessening of the consciousness is already our means of understanding the unconscious; unconsciousness is ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... evasions have been used, both in ancient and modern times, in order to avoid an engagement with the ministers of the gods, who have ever been the tyrants of thought? How many hypotheses and shifts were such men as Descartes, Mallebranche, and Leibnitz, forced to invent, in order to reconcile their discoveries with the fables and mistakes which Religion had consecrated! In what guarded phrases have the greatest philosophers expressed themselves, even at the risk of being absurd, inconsistent, or unintelligible, whenever ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... 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 Anticipation ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... friend Brendel says. Through means of the "Presse Theatrale", which is kindly sent to me, I remain au courant of your exertions. Be not too much annoyed at being an immortal poet and composer; there is nothing worse in this world to which one should apply the following modified version of Leibnitz's well-known axiom: Tout est pour le mieux, dans un des plus ...
— Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, Volume 2 • Francis Hueffer (translator)
... metaphysical, 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
... laureate at the death of Cibber; and some of them whose merit was the most universally acknowledged, remained exposed to all the storms of indigence, and all the stings of mortification. While the queen lived, some countenance was given to learning. She conversed with Newton, and corresponded with Leibnitz. She took pains to acquire popularity; the royal family on certain days dined in public, for the satisfaction of the people: the court was animated with a freedom of spirit and vivacity, which rendered it at once brilliant ...
— The History of England in Three Volumes, Vol.II. - From William and Mary to George II. • Tobias Smollett
... corresponding agreeableness in whatever external object 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
... 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
... entire, and 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. When the ...
— The Heavenly Father - Lectures on Modern Atheism • Ernest Naville
... have tried their hands and head at it. Leibnitz worked at it; Swedenborg prophesied the automobile, and made a carriage, placing the horse inside, and did not give up the scheme until the horse ran away with himself and demolished a year's work. The government here interfered and placed an injunction against ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 12 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Scientists • Elbert Hubbard
... whose statue has recently been erected in 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 and ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... does not go so far.... Out of reality there had been made "appearance"; an absolutely false world, that of being, had been turned into reality.... The success of Kant is merely a theological success; he was, like Luther and Leibnitz, but one more impediment to German integrity, already far ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... lurking among 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 ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... Sixty years after Bacon's death, Newton had crowned the long labors of the astronomers and the physicists, by coordinating the phenomena of solar motion throughout the visible universe into one vast system; but the 'Principia' helped no man to either wealth or comfort. Descartes, Newton, and Leibnitz had opened up new worlds to the mathematician, but the acquisitions of their genius enriched only man's ideal estate. Descartes had laid the foundations of rational cosmogony and of physiological psychology; Boyle had produced models of experimentation in various branches of physics and chemistry; ...
— The Advance of Science in the Last Half-Century • T.H. (Thomas Henry) Huxley
... the system of the Gnome at the very time that the followers of Leibnitz, reasoning on what they saw on the outer surface, might be teaching the opposite doctrine of gradual refrigeration, and averring that the earth had begun its career as a fiery comet, and might be destined hereafter to become a frozen mass. The tenets of the schools of the nether and of the upper ...
— The Harvard Classics Volume 38 - Scientific Papers (Physiology, Medicine, Surgery, Geology) • Various
... who has them at hand to facilitate his inquiries, or to solve his doubts. While Fabricius was thus laudably exercising his great talents in the cause of ancient literature, the illustrious name of LEIBNITZ[134] appeared as author of a work of essential utility to the historian and bibliographer. I allude to his Scriptores Rerum Brunwicensium, which has received a well pointed compliment from the polished pen of Gibbon. After the successful labours of Fabricius and Leibnitz, we may ...
— Bibliomania; or Book-Madness - A Bibliographical Romance • Thomas Frognall Dibdin
... 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 la simplicit ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... "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 a sign of ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... agency explaining the production of physical effects. Many moderns, again, have been unable to conceive the production of effects by volition itself, without some intervening agency to connect it with them. This medium, Leibnitz thought, was some per se efficient physical antecedent; while the Cartesians imagined for the purpose the theory of Occasional Causes, that is, supposed that God, not qua mind, or qua volition, but qua omnipotent, intervenes to connect the volition ...
— Analysis of Mr. Mill's System of Logic • William Stebbing
... my fancy,' he said, 'the world is built out of fancies, the universe is only an extension of the individual mind;' and then he began to ramble on upon every metaphysical theory he had ever read about, from Plato and Aristotle to Leibnitz and Kant, from Hegel to Bain—talking, talking, talking, through the slow hours of that ...
— The Golden Calf • M. E. Braddon
... 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 by those philosophers, turns out to be substantially ...
— Science & Education • Thomas H. Huxley
... it. No science can be constituted without such solidarity; this great truth was felt and, after their manner, demonstrated by scholastic philosophers, or, as it was afterwards scientifically expressed by the genius of Leibnitz: Natura ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... 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 ...
— 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
... a similar image in one of Burns's letters, again in one of Coleridge's poetical fragments, and long before any of them, in a letter of Leibnitz. ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... psychical atavism, and is an unmistakable evidence of degeneration. Lombroso gives a long list of the men of genius who were celibates. I will mention a few of those with whom the English-speaking world is most familiar: Kant, Newton, Pitt, Fox, Beethoven, Galileo, Descartes, Locke, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Gray, Dalton, Hume, Gibbon, Macaulay, Lamb, Bentham, Leonardo da Vinci, Copernicus, Reynolds, Handel, Mendelssohn, Meyerbeer, Schopenhauer, Camoens, and Voltaire. La Bruyere says of men of genius: "These men have neither ancestors ...
— Religion and Lust - or, The Psychical Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire • James Weir
... 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. Instead of arguing upon the merits of the case, Maupertuis declared that the letter of Leibnitz was a forgery, and that therefore Koenig's remarks deserved no further consideration. When ...
— Books and Characters - French and English • Lytton Strachey
... 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, or led ...
— Parisians in the Country - The Illustrious Gaudissart, and The Muse of the Department • Honore de Balzac
... There is a greatness and simplicity, a closeness of thought, a glance keen and wide, 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 ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... consistent," he insisted. We were here interrupted, and I called to mind the cave a censequentariis of Leibnitz. ...
— My Ten Years' Imprisonment • Silvio Pellico
... 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 ...
— Hazlitt on English Literature - An Introduction to the Appreciation of Literature • Jacob Zeitlin
... ultimate, indivisible unit of matter. (See Molecule.) According to Leibnitz, as nearly as he seems willing to be understood, the monad has body without bulk, and mind without manifestation—Leibnitz knows him by the innate power of considering. He has founded upon him a theory of the universe, ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... any instructor," but was obliged to accept some assistance in acquiring Latin and logic. The last-mentioned subject became her particular delight, and at a very tender age she drew up "an abstract" of that science "for her own use." Thus she prepared for her future communion with Locke and with Leibnitz. When she was very small, in spite of frequent conferences with learned members of the Church of England, she became persuaded of the truth of Catholicism and joined the Roman communion. We may conjecture that this coincided with the conversion of her kinsman, Lord Chancellor Perth, but ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse |
