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 LEIBNITZ 323 quest of Egypt," he says, " will give suprem- acy on the sea, the commerce with India, predominance in Christendom, and even an empire in the Orient on the ruins of the Ot- toman power." Another of his suggestions to Louis XIV. was for the publication of a general repertory of human knowledge in the form of a dictionary, thus presenting all the results of scientific labor in their mutual dependences. He proposed illustrated trea- tises on natural history, and states that his own preference would have been to study the laws established by God in nature rather than the laws and customs created by men for them- selves. Several members of the academy of sciences suggested to him that he would be ad- mitted to that body as a pensioner, provided he would become a Catholic ; but he declined, to accept the offer under this condition. In 1673 he visited England, became personally acquainted with Newton, Boyle, Oldenburg, Wallis, and Collins, and was elected a member of the royal society. On his return to Paris in the same year he received instructions in the higher mechanics and analysis from Huygens, to whom, in a letter to the countess Kielmans- egge, he acknowledges himself indebted in his mathematical studies which resulted in the dis- covery of the differential calculus. The death of Boyneburg, soon followed by that of the elector of Mentz (1674), left him without a pa- tron, and he determined to return to Germany. At Paris he received from the duke of Bruns- wick-Luneburg an appointment as councillor, with a pension and with permission to prolong his absence at pleasure. He remained in France till 1676, again visited London, passed through Holland, met with Spinoza at the Hague, an^ on his arrival in Hanover, the residence of the duke of Brunswick, became his librarian, and was partially occupied for six years in arrang- ing and enriching his library. At the congress of Nimeguen (1677) there was a dispute about the right of precedence between the princes who were electors and those who were not. Leibnitz maintained the cause of the latter in a treatise containing the ultramontrane rather than Protestant declaration that all the states of Christendom should form but a single body, having the pope for their spiritual and the em- peror for their temporal head. This idea of a grand theocracy appears prominently in several of his writings, alike in his views of society and of nature. Theology he defined as the jurisprudence of the kingdom of God, as law and politics transferred to a higher and abso- lute sphere. He was one of the founders in 1682 of the Acta Eruditorum of Leipsic, to which he furnished numerous articles. Em- ployed to write the history of the house of Brunswick, he explored the principal libraries and archives of Germany and Italy for ma- terials, returning to Hanover in 1690. The fruits of his researches were the Codex Juris Gentium Diplomatics (2 vols., 1693-1700), a collection of treaties and public documents, with a preface which is one of his masterpieces; Accessiones Historic (2 vols., 1698-1700) ; Scriptores JRerum Brunsmcensium lllustrationi Insermentes (3 vols., 17p7-'ll); and the An- nales Imperil Occidentis Brunsmcenses (first published by Pertz, 2 vols., 1843-'5). His Pro- togcea (first published entire in 1749), a disser- tation on the state of the globe before the cre- ation of man, was intended as an introduction to the last work, and was the first important contribution to the science of geology, which he called natural geography. His hypothesis supposes the prominence of fire in the forma- tion of the earth, the gradual congelation after igneous fusion, the introduction of a vast body of water to cover the surface, and the origin of mountains and valleys by the subsidence of certain portions of the earth breaking in upon vast vaulted caverns. To his influence was chiefly due the foundation of the academy of sciences at Berlin, of which he became the first president in 1702. The first memoir which he presented to the academy was on a binary sys- tem of arithmetic, in which the base of the scale of numeration was the number 2 instead of 10, and the only figures used were 1 and 0. He soon after attempted to form a universal alphabet, the elements of which were to be very simple, like algebraic signs, instead of syllables and words, and were directly to rep- resent ideas. This favorite but futile scheme was the subject of long continued meditations. To Augustus, king of Poland and elector of Saxony, he addressed a series of precepts for the advancement of sciences, with a curious preamble ; and to this period belong his most important philosophical labors. In 1704 he composed his examination of Locke, Nouveaux essais sur Ventendement humain ; he revealed the great variety of his learning in the first volume of the Miscellanea Berolinensia (1710) ; was a frequent contributor to the Journal de Trevoux and the Journal des Savants; and published in 1710 in French his Theodicee, the noblest monument of his genius, in which he grapples with the leading problems of philoso- phy and faith, and which is hardly surpassed as an example at once of metaphysical power and universal erudition. During the latter years of his life he enjoyed the highest per- sonal distinction. A councillor and official historiographer at Hanover, a baron and aulic. councillor with a pension at Vienna, he was consulted by Peter the Great at Torgau in 1711, and rewarded by him with the title of councillor of state and a pension of 1,000 rubles. He had for many years corresponded with the most illustrious persons in Europe on almost all public and scientific questions. He united the leading thinkers of Christendom by an in- terchange of ideas, and from his time the his- tory of philosophy involves more than in any former period the general history of the human mind. To no single person is the civilized world more indebted for the literary commerce between all its parts. To Spinoza he wrote,