Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 64.djvu/420

416 all the world, an asylum for all students of science and art, and to be undisturbed even by war.

Leibniz (1646-1716), though unwilling to break with the old learning which the universities cherished, had breathed the breath of the new learning which came in with the Renaissance and the Reformation. Holding fast to all that was valuable in the traditions of the past, he early became an ardent advocate of the new methods of study which science, even in its beginnings, introduced, and through the founding of academies in the great capitals of Europe sought to unite the tendencies of the time with the protestant spirit of research and criticism. A many-sided man, philosopher, theologian, jurist, politician, philologist, physicist, an acute observer, fond of experiment, with a constructive mind, restless in his eagerness for knowledge, he did more than any man of his era to forward the study of nature and to emphasize its unity. Through the establishment of an academy in Germany under royal patronage he thought he could demonstrate the harmony of the world in study and research and realize the unity of human society. His first proposal for a society for the study of science was made in 1667 when he was but twenty-one years old, his last only seventeen days before his death. He suggested and furthered, so far ar. he could, the union of all the learned societies of Europe, a plan which has been partially realized in our own time. He lived in Hannover, where he made himself useful to the Brunswick princes as a historian, although he did not possess their complete confidence as a politician. Having observed the working of the French Academy when on a visit to Paris in 1675, the following year he proposed a German academy somewhat on its model, and even named the fortyeight men who were to compose it. He proposed later, as protestants seemed indifferent to his project, that the Pope divide the fields of learning among the catholic orders, assigning the study of nature to the Benedictines and Cistercians, that of law to the Dominicans and the Jesuits, that of language to other orders, and to the Franciscans the care of souls. If the princes of the House of Brunswick failed to give him their entire confidence, he had an unfailing friend in the Princess Sophie (1630-1714), daughter of Frederick V. of the Palatinate, and mother of George I. of England. It was through her daughter, Sophie Charlotte, who married the elector of Brandenburg September 28, 1684, and who had been educated under the eye of Leibniz, that he realized at last his hope of founding an academy in Berlin. Of this woman Frederick the Great said she had both 'the spirit of society and of true culture,' and that 'she brought the love of science and the arts into Prussia.' She was a gifted, charming woman, and so eager for knowledge that even Leibniz was wont to say of her that she was never satisfied with reasons which were sufficient for others, she 'must know the why of the why.' Although Leibniz