We learn that the Messrs. Appleton have in press, and will soon publish "The Temporal Mission of the Holy Ghost," by the Most Rev. H. E. Manning, Archbishop of Westminster, which has just been issued by the Longmans, of London.
THE CATHOLIC WORLD.
VOL. II., NO. 10—JANUARY, 1866.
Translated from Le Correspondant
LEIBNITZ AND BOSSUET. [Footnote 66]
[Footnote 66: "Oeuvres de Leibnitz, publiées pour la prémière fois d'après les Manuscrits's, avec des notes et une introduction," par A. Foucher de Carcil. Paris: Firmin-Didot. Tomes. I. et II.]
Every friend of letters must greet with sincere pleasure the literary enterprise of M. de Careil in undertaking a complete edition of the writings of Leibnitz, a large part of which has hitherto remained unpublished and even unknown, and especially to make that great genius live anew for us in all his fulness and integrity. No greater literary undertaking ever seduced the imagination of a young erudite, is better fitted to attract the sympathy of the European republic, or more difficult of execution. For it was precisely the peculiarity of Leibnitz that, while he labored to embrace with a firmness of grasp never equalled the whole of moral and physical nature, all things real, ideal, or possible, in one and the same system, he uniformly abstained from giving, in his writings, to that system its full and entire development. Possessing the amplest and most complete mind that ever lived, he took no care to give to any of his works the seal of completeness and perfection. The inventor of so many methods, mathematical and metaphysical, he never arranged his ideas in a methodical order. He leads his readers, with a rapid and firm step, through a labyrinth of abstract conceptions and boundless erudition, but he suffers no hand but his own to hold the guiding thread. He has left us numerous tracts and fragments of great value indeed, but no work that reveals the unity of his system, and gives us a summary of his doctrines. There is no summa of the Leibnitzian science and philosophy. We might say that, by a sort of coquetry, while he sought to know and explain everything in nature, he took care that the secret of his own heart should not for a moment escape him.
Hence it becomes important to bring together and arrange in their natural order his scattered members, so as to give them the cohesion they lack, to combine his several personages, the philosopher, the moralist, the geometrician, the naturalist, the erudite, the diplomatist, and the courtier, in one living being, and present the giant armed at all points as he came forth from the hands of his Maker. Hence also the difficulty [{434}] of the task. It requires to accomplish it the universality of tastes, if not of faculties, possessed by the model to be reconstructed. It presents one of those cases in which to reproduce nature it is almost necessary to equal nature, and to resuscitate is hardly less difficult than to create. Only a Cuvier is able to collect and put in their place the gigantic bones and powerful fins of Leviathan.