Page:Leibniz as a Politician.djvu/40

 complete. And George II did actually go so far as to command the publication of the Origines Guelficæ (in which, as treating of the dynasty, he naturally took more interest than in the companion work, which had a wider basis and a wider scope), and four out of the five folios of this part of the undertaking which Leibniz had left to be executed by his assistant, successor and indefatigable backbiter Eckhart, were actually published in 1753. The Annales Brunsvicenses, which Leibniz himself had in substance completed, had to wait nearly a century longer, when, in the years 1843-5, they were published as part of Pertz's Monumenta Germaniæ. Thus it was as part of a great national historical collection, not as the record of one particular principality, that the great historical work which Leibniz had been unable to lay at the feet of George I was given to the world.

It is not as a historian that I have spoken of Leibniz to you today. I wished to add a note—it is no more—to my dear friend and honoured colleague s chapter only from the point of view of the political endeavours of the great man who to me is familiar from this side only or chiefly. It is for those of you who have read Leibniz as a philosopher and who know how as such he strove to bring all his studies—mathematical, linguistic and the rest—into harmony with his philosophical conceptions of the purposes of the Universe—it is for you to say whether the lesser side of his activity is out of harmony with the greater. I should be surprised if such were your conclusion either as to his religious or even as to his purely temporal politics; or rather I should attribute it to the imperfect and fragmentary nature of my note. Genius is not pieced together out of dissimilar or discordant elements; and the self-education of a great man, which is the highest type of all education, has for its end, unattainable yet never to be renounced, the perfection of all the powers which he holds in trust. No doubt, Leibniz attempted too much. No doubt, in the words of the most eminent of his