Page:Leibniz as a Politician.djvu/8

 Adamson s memory in a University in the building up of which he had a large share, I hardly knew whether I should be doing honour to that memory by accepting the invitation. But, searching, as I may confess to you, for excuses which might, at all events in my own eyes, palliate my presumptuousness in following a natural impulse, I remembered that in a course of public lectures which we had organised in this College not long before Professor Adamson transferred his services to one of the chosen seminaries of philosophical study north of the Tweed, his friendly disregard of my unfitness for the match actually went so far as to allow me to associate myself with him in a continued series of discourses, of which, I need hardly say, all the honours remained with him. Thus it occurred to me that you might be willing, on the present occasion also, to regard what I have to offer you as a sort of supplement or excursus to a passage in one of his own admirable lectures. For the rest, I have long thought that, while on the one hand no great man and no great life can be thoroughly understood unless they are viewed under all their main aspects, so nothing can be more futile, when seeking to form or formulate a judgment of a great individual force in history or in life, than the resolute exclusion even of a subsidiary aspect, because its significance is only secondary. And to no man does this apply more fully than to Leibniz, whose intellectual activity, more varied than that of any but a very few moderns, was singularly consistent with itself and with the desire for harmony which so largely shaped his thought and swayed his philosophy. I say moderns, for to what ancient sage would not the very notion of an intellectual activity labelled in different directions like a sign-post have seemed preposterous?

And yet, were I to attempt in the course of our brief hour to present even the merest outline of what Professor Adamson, using the word in its narrower sense, describes as the public work of Leibniz, no epitome could ever have fallen further short of the relative