Ab Jove principium. M. de Careil begins with theology. These two volumes placed at the head of his edition are taken up with writings some of which had already been printed, others had remained in manuscript, but all subjected to a careful revision and enriched by learned notes, which pertain exclusively to matters of religion. If the ancient classification, which gave to theology the precedence of all other matters, had not every claim to our respect, we might, perhaps, permit ourselves to find fault with this arrangement of the works of Leibnitz, which will cause, I am sure, some surprise to the learned public. His theological writings were his first neither in the order of time nor in the order of merit. He did not open his brilliant career with religious discussions, nor was it by them that he was chiefly distinguished, or left his deepest trace. He made in theology, no discoveries as fruitful as the infinitesimal calculus, and gave it no problems that have fetched so many and so distant echoes as his theories of optimism and monadology. Why, then, open the series with those writings which did not begin it, and which do not give us its summary, and give the precedence to works, merely accessory and of doubtful value, over so many others which earlier, more constantly, and more gloriously occupied his laborious life?
There is still another objection to this distribution of matters which M. de Careil has made. The theological writings of Leibnitz consist almost exclusively in his correspondence, and are parts of the negotiation for the reunion of the different Christian communions of which, for a brief time, he was the medium. Correspondences are admirable means of gaining an insight into the private and personal character of men whose public life and works are already known, but taken by themselves they are always obscure and difficult to be understood. The reason is, that people who correspond are usually mutual acquaintances, and understand each other by a hint or half a word. They are familiar with contemporary events, and waste no time in narrating them, or in explaining what each already knows. Facts and ideas are treated by simple allusions, intelligible enough to the correspondents, but unintelligible to a posterity that lacks their information. The correspondence of Leibnitz, which M. de Careil publishes, is far from being free from this grave inconvenience. Leibnitz appears in it in the maturity of his age, and the full splendor of his renown. He speaks with the authority of a philosopher in full credit, and of a counsellor enjoying the confidence of an important German court. His correspondents treat him with the respect due to an acknowledged celebrity, and even a power. In the course of the discussion he is carrying on he introduces many of his well known metaphysical principles, but briefly, as ideas familiar to those whom he addresses, and less for the purpose of teaching than of recalling them to the memory.
His manner of writing, of rushing, so to speak, in medias res, takes the inexperienced reader by surprise, and appears to conform to the adventurous habits of dramatic art much more than to the sound rules of erudition, which proceeds slowly, with measured step, marking in advance the place where it is to plant its foot. Few among us are sufficiently acquainted with the facts in detail of the life of Leibnitz, or know well enough the secret of his opinions, to be able to render an account to [{435}] ourselves of the part we see him—a lay-citizen—playing among emperors, kings, princes, and prelates, or the relation that subsists between his system of monads and scholastic theology. Hence it often happens that we neither know who is speaking, nor of what he is speaking. This frequently causes us an embarrassment to which M. de Careil is himself too much a stranger to be able sufficiently to compassionate it. He has lived ten years with Leibnitz in the Library of Hanover, his habitual residence, and he knows every lineament of the face of his hero, and—not the least of his merits—deciphers at a glance his formless and most illegible scrawl. We are not, therefore, astonished that in his learned introductions and his notes, full of matter, he makes no account of difficulties which we in our ignorance are utterly unable to overcome.
But we are convinced that the knowledge the editor has acquired by his invaluable labors would have been far more available to his readers if he had condensed it into a detailed biography, such as he only could write, than as he gives it, scattered at the beginning of each volume, or in a note at the foot of each page. An historical notice, comprising the history of the intellect as well as of the life of Leibnitz, an exposition of ideas as well as of facts, and the arrangement of the didactic works according to the order of their subjects and their importance, followed by the fragments and correspondence, the order adopted by nearly all collectors of great polygraphs, would, it seems to us, have been much better, and simply the dictate of reason and experience. Introduced by M. de Careil into the monument he erects not by the front, through the peristyle, but by a low, side door, we run at least great risk of not seizing the whole in its proportions.
I confess that I have also a personal reason for regretting the arrangement adopted by M. de Careil. I had occasion formerly, among the sins of my youth, to examine, with very little preparatory study I admit, and in documents by no means so abundant and so exact as those which are now placed within our reach, the negotiations pursued by Leibnitz for the union of Christian communions, which take up the whole of these two volumes. From that examination, along with that of a small tract naturally attached to it, I came, on the religious opinions of the great philosopher, to certain conclusions which I set forth in the 32d number of the first series of this periodical, which M. de Careil, even then deeply engaged in this study of Leibnitz, has felt it his duty, in a discussion marked by great urbanity, to combat. It is my misfortune to persist in those conclusions, and more strenuously than ever in consequence of the new light which seems to me to be furnished by this publication, and to which I cannot dispense myself from briefly recurring. In so doing I fear that I shall appear to some readers to have sought or to have accepted too readily an occasion for resuming a discussion of little importance, and which probably few except myself remember. M. de Careil, I hope, will do me the justice to acquit me of a thought so puerile. Nobody would have been more eager than myself to admire, in the picture he presents us, the figures which naturally occupy the foreground; but if the eye is forced to pause at first on some insignificant detail, it perhaps is not a defect of taste in the spectator; may it not be a defect of skill in the artist?
I.
These reserves made, we proceed to examine, with some care, the changes rendered necessary, by this new and complete edition, in the opinion previously adopted by the biographers of Leibnitz in regard to the religious negotiation of which he was for a moment the accredited medium, and in which we find mingled the great name of Bossuet. Several important [{436}] points are much modified by the documents now brought to light for the first time.
We learn, in the outset, that the negotiation for the union of the Protestant communions with the Holy See was far more important than is commonly thought, and was continued for a much longer time. The earliest documents in relation to it published by M. de Careil date from 1671, whilst the previous editors of Leibnitz and Bossuet suppose that the first overtures were made only in the year 1690, a difference of twenty years; and it appears from these documents, hitherto perfectly unknown, that it was precisely during those twenty years that success came the nearest being obtained, and that the highest influences were employed to obtain it.
During this period, from 1670 to 1690, the Catholic revival of the seventeenth century was at its apogee, and nearly all the German sovereigns were animated by a strong desire to effect the religious pacification of their subjects. The wounds caused by the Thirty Years' War were hardly closed by the peace of Westphalia, and every one felt the mortal blow which religious dissension had struck to the Germanic power by breaking the old unity of the empire. Beside, all eyes were turned toward France, where religion and royalty seemed to move on together in perfect harmony, and displayed an unequalled splendor. France, under her young monarch, Louis XIV., was at once the object of envy and of dread; and the re-establishment of religious unity in Germany, torn by mutually hostile communions, seemed to the sovereign princes the only means of resembling France, and at the same time of resisting her power.
When, therefore, Rogas Spinola, confessor to the empress, the wife of Leopold I., at first Bishop of Tina, afterward of Neustadt, a man of mild temperament and sound sense, became the intermediary agent of the general desire for peace, and after having sounded the leading Protestant theologians, went to Rome to ascertain the extent of the concessions to which the maternal authority of the Church could consent, he was warmly supported not only by his own sovereign, the emperor, but also by fourteen other reigning sovereigns of Germany, some of them Catholic and others Protestant. Such was the strange religious confusion in the German States that in more than one the sovereign was Catholic and the nation Protestant, or the sovereign was Protestant and the nation Catholic. In the former condition was the Elector of Hanover, John Frederic of Brunswick, of whom Leibnitz was librarian and private secretary. This prince could not fail to enter with zeal into a plan which promised to fill up the gulf between him and his Protestant subjects.