Gottfried Wilhelm 1646-1716 Leibnitz or Leibniz

Political Writings.

The policy of the elector, which the pen of Leibnitz was now called upon to promote, was to maintain the security of the German empire, threatened on the west by the aggressive power of France, on the east by Turkey and Russia. Thus when in 1669 the crown of Poland became vacant, it fell to Leibnitz to support the claims of the German candidate, which he did in his first political writing, Specimen demonstrationum pou ticarum pro rege Polonorum eligendo, attempting, under the guise of a Catholic Polish nobleman, to show by mathematical demon stration that it was necessary in the interest of Poland that it should have the count palatine of Neuburg as its king. But neither the diplomatic skill of Boyneburg, who had been sent as plenipotentiary to the election at Warsaw, nor the arguments of Leibnitz were successful and a Polish prince was elected to fill the vacant throne.

A greater danger threatened Germany in the aggressions of Louis XIV. (see FRANCE: History). Though Holland was in most immediate danger, the seizure of Lorraine in 1670 showed that Germany too was threatened. It was in this year that Leibnitz wrote his Thoughts on Public Safety, in which he urged the forma tion of a new "Rheinbund" for the protection of Germany, and contended that the States of Europe should employ their power, not against one another, but in the conquest of the non-Christian world, in which Egypt, "one of the best situated lands in the world," would fall to France. The plan thus proposed of averting the threatened attack on Germany by a French expedition to Egypt was discussed with Boyneburg, and obtained the approval of the elector. French relations with Turkey were at the time so strained as to make a breach imminent, and at the close of 1671, about the time when the war with Holland broke out, Louis him self was approached by a letter from Boyneburg and a short memorial from the pen of Leibnitz, who attempted to show that Holland itself, as a mercantile power trading with the East, might be best attacked through Egypt, while nothing would be easier for France or would more largely increase her power than the con quest of Egypt. On Feb. 12, 1672, a request came from the French secretary of State, Simon Arnauld de Pomponne (1618 99), that Leibnitz should go to Paris. Louis seems still to have kept the matter in view, but never granted Leibnitz the personal interview he desired, while Pomponne wrote, "I have nothing against the plan of a holy war, but such plans, you know, since the days of St. Louis, have ceased to be the fashion." Not yet discouraged, Leibnitz wrote a full account of his project for the king, and a summary of the same (Consilium Aegyptiacum) evi dently intended for Boyneburg. But Boyneburg died in Dec.

1672, before the latter could be sent to him. Nor did the former ever reach its destination. The French quarrel with the Porte was made up, and the plan of a French expedition to Egypt dis appeared from practical politics till the time of Napoleon. The his tory of this scheme, and the reason of Leibnitz's journey to Paris, long remained hidden in the archives of the Hanoverian library. It was on his taking possession of Hanover in 1803 that Napoleon learned, through the Consilium Aegyptiacum, that the idea of a French conquest of Egypt had been first put forward by a Ger man philosopher. In the same year there was published in London an account of the Justa dissertatio (A Summary Account of Leib nitz's Memoir addressed to Lewis the Fourteenth, ed. Granville Penn, 1803) of which the British Government had procured a copy in 1799. But it was only with the appearance of the edition of Leibnitz's works begun by Onno Klopp in 1864 that the full history of the scheme was made known.

Leibnitz had other than political ends in view in his visit to France. It was as the centre of literature and science that Paris chiefly attracted him. Political duties never made him lose sight of his philosophical and scientific interests. At Mainz he was still busied with the question of the relation between the old and new methods in philosophy. In a letter to Jakob Thomasius (1669) he contends that the mechanical explanation of nature by magnitude, figure and motion alone is not inconsistent with the doctrines of Aristotle's Physics, in which he finds more truth than in the Meditations of Descartes. Yet these qualities of bodies, he argues in 1668 (in an essay published without his knowledge under the title Confessio naturae contra atheistas), require an incorpo real principle, or God, for their ultimate explanation. He also wrote at this time a defence of the doctrine of the Trinity against Wissowatius (1669), and an essay on philosophic style, introduc tory to an edition of the Anti-barbarus of Nizolius (1670). Clear ness and distinctness alone, he says, are what makes a philosophic style, and no language is better suited for this popular exposition than the German. In 1671 he issued a Hypothesis physics nova, in which, agreeing with Descartes that corporeal phenomena should be explained from motion, he carried out the mechanical explanation of nature by contending that the original of this mo tion is a fine aether, similar to light, or rather constituting it, which, penetrating all bodies in the direction of the earth's axis, produces the phenomena of gravity, elasticity, etc. The first part of the essay, on concrete motion, was dedicated to the Royal So ciety of London, the second, on abstract motion, to the French academy.