Page:Leibniz as a Politician.djvu/13

 all who are interested in the life and labours of Leibniz, while of both this subject of Religious Reunion forms a constant theme. The letters exchanged between Leibniz and the Duchess, afterwards Electress, Sophia of Hanover are, as you know, of great biographical interest, so far as the life and opinions of an illustrious lady fit ancestress of a long line of English sovereigns are concerned. Gifted with extraordinary acuteness of perception and a lively interest in things intellectual, at the same time perfectly self-possessed and when needful self-restrained in the difficulties of life and hers seemed almost endless in maidenhood, marriage, and old age she, unlike her quondam quasi suitor, afterwards King Charles II, seems while saying many witty things, never to have done an unwise one. What is of more importance, her opinions, so far as we can judge from a series of personal records quite exceptionally full and varied, were rarely on any side but that of good sense and right feeling. At the same time, as Leibniz very well knew, even matters in which she felt an interest had to be presented to her in lucid and attractive form; she was a princess first, after all, and not a philosopher, like her aunt the Princess Palatine Elizabeth, with whom Descartes had corresponded on scientific topics as with an equal; nor did she profess to care for what was lengthy or intricate, or involved an unreasonable amount of application in the mastering of it. Religious questions she approached, like all other questions, with a sincere love of truth, but with a want of interest in theological issues and formulae partly due to the natural constitution of her mind, partly (one cannot but conjecture) to the experiences of her life, which had been so full of these contentions and of their untoward effects upon the problem of getting on in the world as to breed in her a good deal of indifference towards them.

The other correspondent to whom Leibniz had as it were to render a continuous account of the progress of his endeavours in the Reunion question was a spirit of another sort. Landgrave Ernest of Hesse-Rheinfels was