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148 the most fastidious moralist. Hence those amusing and interesting contrasts by which Cervantes so powerfully attaches us to the hero of his story; chastising the wildest freaks of a disordered imagination, by a stateliness yet courtesy of virtue, and (on all subjects but one) by a superiority of good sense and of philosophical refinement, which, even under the most ludicrous circumstances, never cease to command our respect and to keep alive our sympathy.

In Italy, notwithstanding the persecution undergone by Galileo, physics and astronomy continued to be cultivated with success by Torricelli, Borelli, Cassini, and others; and in pure geometry, Viviani rose to the very first eminence, as the Restorer, or rather as the Diviner of ancient discoveries; but, in all those studies which require the animating spirit of civil and religious liberty, this once renowned country exhibited the most melancholy symptoms of mental decrepitude. “Rome,” says a French historian, “was too much interested in maintaining her principles, not to raise every imaginable barrier against what might destroy them. Hence that index of prohibited books, into which were put the history of the President de Thou; the works on the liberties of the Gallican church; and (who could have believed it?) the translations of the Holy Scriptures. Meanwhile, this tribunal, though always ready to condemn judicious authors upon frivolous suspicions of heresy, approved those seditious and fanatical theologists, whose writings tended to the encouragement of regicide, and the destruction of government. The approbation.and censure of books (it is justly added) deserve a place im the history of the human mind.”

The great glory of the Continent towards the end of the seventeenth century (I except only the philosophers of France) was Leibnitz. He was born as early as 1646; and distinguished himself, while still a very young man, by a display of those talents which were afterwards to contend with the united powers of Clarke and of Newton. I have already introduced his name among the writers on Natural Law; but, in every other respect, he ranks more fitly with the contemporaries of his old age than with those of his youth. My reasons for thinking so will appear in the sequel. In the meantime, it may suffice to remark, that Leibnitz, the Jurist, belongs to one century, and Leibnitz, the Philosopher, to another.

In this, and other analogous distributions of my materials, as well as in the order I have followed in the arrangement of particular facts, it may be proper, once for all, to observe, that much must necessarily be left to the discretionary, though not to the arbitrary decision of the author’s judgment;—that the dates which separate from each other the different stages in the progress of Human Reason, do not, like those which occur in the history of the exact sciences, admit of being fixed with chronological and indisputable precision; 12