Page:Leibniz as a Politician.djvu/11

 —it seems to bring two epochs of Western intellectual life rather closely together to find Leibniz writing about Dryden as a contemporary—&quot;because his Virgil has put more than £1,000 into his pocket. But I wish that Mr. Halley could secure the same sum at least four times over so as to be able to travel round the world and discover for us the secret of the variation of the compass, and I wish that Mr. Newton could obtain it tenfold and a good deal over, in order to be able to continue his profound meditations without interruption.&quot; You see how Leibniz thought of the endowment of research; and, if his indefatigable exertions at Vienna, at Berlin, and elsewhere in favour of those Academies and Societies whose true purpose is the promotion viribus unitis of great researches in the whole boundless realm of human knowledge be taken into account, I should be at a loss to say what other individual has ever equalled him in advancing the highest of all forms of educational work. One cannot but speculate on the satisfaction with which he would have regarded such conceptions on the value of organised University research as have lately been brought to the eve of practical realisation at Berlin, on the occasion of the centenary of its great University—an institution which he may almost be said to have foreseen.

On the other hand, he showed himself fully aware of the signficance [sic] of literary expression as one of the chief agencies by which national self-knowledge and national self-reliance are trained and matured. He perceived that the vernacular (what an unfortunate term! let me say, the mother-tongue) is the instrument with which Providence has supplied a nation resolved on having and holding these possessions; and, a few years before the foundation-deed of the Berlin Academy declared the preservation and the study of the German language to be one of its chief tasks, Leibniz had promulgated the principles then first officially approved. And, if the style of his numerous German compositions in prose and in verse still offers an unmistakable and at times