The "De Principio Individui" was the last treatise of any note in the sense and style of the old scholastic philosophy. It was also one of the last blows aimed at scholasticism, which, long undermined by the Saxon Reformation, received its coup de grace a century later from the pen of an English wit. "Cornelius," says the author of "Martinus Scriblerus," told Martin that a shoulder of mutton was an individual; which Crambe denied, for he had seen it cut into commons. 'That's true,' quoth the Tutor, 'but you never saw it cut into shoulders of mutton.' 'If it could be,' quoth Crambe, 'it would be the loveliest individual of the University.' When he was told that a substance was that which is subject to accidents: 'Then soldiers,' quoth Crambe, 'are the most substantial people in the world.' Neither would he allow it to be a good definition of accident, that it could be present or absent without the destruction of the subject, since there are a great many accidents that destroy the subject, as burning does a house and death a man. But as to that, Cornelius informed him that there was a natural death and a logical death; and that though a man after his natural death was incapable of the least parish office, yet he might still keep his stall among the logical predicaments….
Crambe regretted extremely that Substantial Forms, a race of harmless beings which had lasted for many years and had afforded a comfortable subsistence to many poor philosophers, should now be hunted down like so many wolves, without the possibility of retreat. He considered that it had gone much harder with them than with the Essences, which had retired from the schools into the apothecaries' shops, where some of them had been advanced into the degree of Quintessences. He thought there should be a retreat for poor substantial forms amongst the gentlemen-ushers at court; and that there were, indeed, substantial forms, such as forms of prayer and forms of government, without which the things themselves could never long subsist….
Metaphysics were a large field in which to exercise the weapons which logic had put in their hands. Here Martin and Crambe used to engage like any prizefighters. And as prize-fighters will agree to lay aside a buckler, or some such defensive weapon, so Crambe would agree not to use simpliciter and secundum quid, if Martin would part with materialiter and formaliter. But it was found, that, without the defensive armor of these distinctions, the arguments cut so deep that they fetched blood at every stroke. Their theses were picked out of Suarez, Thomas Aquinas, and other learned writers on those subjects…. One, particularly, remains undecided to this day,— 'An praeter esse reale actualis essentiae sit alind esse necessarium quo res actualiter existat?' In English thus: 'Whether, besides the real being of actual being, there be any other being necessary to cause a thing to be?' [8]
[Footnote 8: Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus. Chap. VII.]
Arrived at maturity, Leibnitz rose at once to classic eminence. He became a conspicuous figure, he became a commanding power, not only in the intellectual world, of which he constituted himself the centre, but in part also of the civil. It lay in the nature of his genius to prove all things, and it lay in his temperament to seek rapport with all sorts of men. He was infinitely related;—not an individual of note in his day but was linked with him by some common interest or some polemic grapple; not a savant or statesman with whom Leibnitz did not spin, on one pretence or another, a thread of communication. Europe was reticulated with the meshes of his correspondence. "Never," says Voltaire, "was intercourse among philosophers more universal; Leibnitz servait à l'animer." He writes now to Spinoza at the Hague, to suggest new methods of manufacturing lenses,—now to Magliabecchi at Florence, urging, in elegant Latin verses, the publication of his bibliographical discoveries,—and now to Grimaldi, Jesuit missionary in China, to communicate his researches in Chinese philosophy. He hoped by means of the latter to operate on the Emperor Cham-Hi with the Dyadik; [9] and even suggested said Dyadik as a key to the cipher of the book "Ye Kim," supposed to contain the sacred mysteries of Fo. He addresses Louis XIV., now on the subject of a military expedition to Egypt, (a magnificent idea, which it needed a Napoleon to realize,) now on the best method of promoting and conserving scientific knowledge. He corresponds with the Landgrave of Hesse-Rheinfels, with Bossuet, and with Madame Brinon on the Union of the Catholic and Protestant Churches, and with Privy-Counsellor von Spanheim on the Union of the Lutheran and Reformed,—with Père Des Bosses on Transubstantiation, and with Samuel Clarke on Time and Space,—with Remond de Montmort on Plato, and with Franke on Popular Education,— with the Queen of Prussia (his pupil) on Free-will and Predestination, and with the Electress Sophia, her mother, (in her eighty-fourth year,) on English Politics,—with the cabinet of Peter the Great on the Slavonic and Oriental Languages, and with that of the German Emperor on the claims of George Lewis to the honors of the Electorate,—and finally, with all the savans of Europe on all possible scientific questions.
[Footnote 9: A species of binary arithmetic, invented by Leibnitz, in which the only figures employed are 0 and 1.—See KORTHOLT'S G.C. Leibnitii Epistolae ad Divarsos, Letter XVIII.]
[Transcriber's note: without this notation and its underlying logic, the development of modern computers would have not been practical.]
Of this world-wide correspondence a portion related to the sore subject of his litigated claim to originality in the discovery of the Differential Calculus,—a matter in which Leibnitz felt himself grievously wronged, and complained with justice of the treatment he received at the hands of his contemporaries. The controversy between him and Newton, respecting this hateful topic, would never have originated with either of these illustrious men, had it depended on them alone to vindicate their respective claims. Officious and ill-advised friends of the English philosopher, partly from misguided zeal and partly from levelled malice, preferred on his behalf a charge of plagiarism against the German, which Newton was not likely to have urged for himself. "The new Calculus, which Europe lauds, is nothing less," they suggested, "than your fluxionary method, which Mr. Leibnitz has pirated, anticipating its tardy publication by the genuine author. Why suffer your laurels to be wrested from you by a stranger?" Thereupon arose the notorious Commercium Epistolicum, in which Wallis, Fatio de Duillier, Collins, and Keill were perversely active. Melancholy monument of literary and national jealousy! Weary record of a vain strife! Ideas are no man's property. As well pretend to ownership of light, or set up a claim to private estate in the Holy Ghost. The Spirit blows where it lists. Truth inspires whom it finds. He who knows best to conspire with it has it. Both philosophers swerved from their native simplicity and nobleness of soul. Both sinned and were sinned against. Leibnitz did unhandsome things, but he was sorely tried. His heart told him that the right of the quarrel was on his side, and the general stupidity would not see it. The general malice, rejoicing in aspersion of a noble name, would not see it. The Royal Society would not see it,—nor France, until long after Leibnitz's death. Sir David Brewster's account of the matter, according to the German authorities, Gerhardt, Guhrauer, and others, is one-sided, and sins by suppressio veri, ignoring important documents, particularly Leibnitz's letter to Oldenburg, August 27, 1676. Gerhardt has published Leibnitz's own history of the Calculus as a counter-statement. [10] But even from Brewster's account, as we remember it, (we have it not by us at this writing.) there is no more reason to doubt that Leibnitz's discovery was independent of Newton's than that Newton's was independent of Leibnitz's. The two discoveries, in fact, are not identical; the end and application are the same, but origin and process differ, and the German method has long superseded the English. The question in debate has been settled by supreme authority. Leibnitz has been tried by his peers. Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, Poisson, and Biot have honorably acquitted him of plagiarism, and reinstated him in his rights as true discoverer of the Differential Calculus.
[Footnote 10: Historia et Oriffo Calculi Differenttalis, a G. G.
LEIBNITIO conscripts.]
[Transcriber's note: this controversy rages in academia to this day.]