"Leibnitz" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... the one. For our spiritual genealogy is not from them, but from a nearer and double line of begetters, including seers—in the true sense of the word—and saints, for both are represented by Kepler and Hooker, Newton and Jeremy Taylor, Descartes and Spinoza, Leibnitz and Wesley, Spencer and Newman. And even these have authority not through any divine right of genius or acquired claim of learning, but because they illumine and interpret obscure suggestions of our own thoughts. Indeed, to ...
— Pantheism, Its Story and Significance - Religions Ancient And Modern • J. Allanson Picton
... of intellectual skill which chess admits of, has been considered and pronounced so high, that Leibnitz declared it to be far less a game than a science. Euler, Franklin, Buckle and others have expressed similar views; and the Egyptians, the Persians, and the Arabians according to many writers, including Mr. Warton and the Rev. Mr. Lambe, ...
— Chess History and Reminiscences • H. E. Bird
... According to Leibnitz, everything that exists is replete with life, full of vital activity, if not an actual mass of living individualities. But this daring hypothesis has ceased to attract the attention it once received. There are states and conditions of matter in respect to which it ...
— Life: Its True Genesis • R. W. Wright
... tidal wave of spiritual evolution is passing through that arc of its circuit. The "Monadic Essence" begins to imperceptibly differentiate in the vegetable kingdom. As the monads are uncompounded things, as correctly defined by Leibnitz, it is the spiritual essence which vivifies them in their degrees of differentiation which constitutes properly the monad—not the atomic aggregation which is only the vehicle and the substance through which thrill the lower and higher ...
— Five Years Of Theosophy • Various
... subjects. There is a greatness and simplicity, a closeness of thought, a glance keen and wide, a play of the entire nature, and a truthfulness and downrightness, with an amount, and accuracy, and vivification of learning, such as we know of in no one other writer, ancient or modern—not even Leibnitz; and we know no writings which so wholesomely at once exalt and humble the reader, make him feel what is in him, and what he can and may, as well as what he cannot, and need never hope to know. In this respect, Hamilton is as grand as Pascal, and more simple; ...
— Spare Hours • John Brown
... criticism: they are far from despising it; on the contrary, they hold it in honour, if they are clear-sighted; but they shrink from devoting themselves to it, for fear of using a razor, as is said, to cut stones. "I have no mind," wrote Leibnitz to Basnage, who had exhorted him to compile an immense Corpus of unpublished and printed documents relating to the history of the law of nations; "I have no mind to turn transcriber.... Does it not occur to you ...
— Introduction to the Study of History • Charles V. Langlois
... eminence and abilities secured his admission into the Royal Society of London in 1697, and afterwards into the Academies of Berlin and Paris. His merit was so well known and acknowledged by the Royal Society that they judged him a fit person to decide the famous contest between Newton and G. W. Leibnitz (see INFINITESIMAL CALCULUS). The life of Demoivre was quiet and uneventful. His old age was spent in obscure poverty, his friends and associates having nearly all passed away before him. He died at London, on the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 8, Slice 2 - "Demijohn" to "Destructor" • Various
... beaten down even by Papal authority—might have raised him to the Patriarchate of the Philosophical Church. It was long disputed whether the honour of inventing the method of Fluxions belonged to Newton or to Leibnitz. It is now generally allowed that these great men made the same discovery at the same time. Mathematical science, indeed, had then reached such a point that, if neither of them had ever existed, the principle must inevitably have occurred to ...
— The Miscellaneous Writings and Speeches of Lord Macaulay, Vol. 2 (of 4) - Contributions To The Edinburgh Review • Thomas Babington Macaulay
... neglected by writers on the eighteenth century. He has no biographer. M. Walferdin wrote (in an edition of Diderot's Works, Paris, 1821, Vol. XII p. 115): "Nous nous occupons depuis longtemps rassembler les matriaux qui doivent servir venger la mmoire du philosophe de la patrie de Leibnitz, et dans l'ouvrage que nous nous proposons de publier sous le titre "D'Holbach jug par ses contemporains" nous esprons faire justement apprcier ce savant si estimable par la profondeur et la varit de ses ...
— Baron d'Holbach - A Study of Eighteenth Century Radicalism in France • Max Pearson Cushing
... comprehensiveness; the mental decrepitude it occasions he dignifies with the appellation of repose; and, on the strength of comprehensiveness and repose, is of course qualified to take his seat beside Shakspeare, and chat cosily with Bacon, and wink knowingly at Goethe, and startle Leibnitz with a slap on the shoulder,—the true Red-Republican sign of liberty in manners, equality in power, and fraternity in ideas! These men, to be sure, have a way of saying things which he has not yet caught; but then their ...
— Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 1, No. 7, May, 1858 • Various
... will lead us, not in one straight series, but by many roads, step by step, gradation by gradation, from man, at the summit, to specks of animated jelly at the bottom of the series. So that the idea of Leibnitz, and of Bonnet, that animals form a great scale of being, in which there are a series of gradations from the most complicated form to the lowest and simplest; that idea, though not exactly in the form in which it was ...
— American Addresses, with a Lecture on the Study of Biology • Tomas Henry Huxley
... divinity student lately come among us to whom I commonly address remarks like the above, allowing him to take a certain share in the conversation, so far as assent or pertinent questions are involved. He abused his liberty on this occasion by presuming to say that Leibnitz had the same observation.—No, sir, I replied, he has not. But he said a mighty good thing about mathematics, that sounds something like it, and you found it, NOT IN THE ORIGINAL, but quoted by Dr. Thomas Reid. I will tell the company what he did ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... the Academy of Berlin proposed a prize for an eloge of Leibnitz. The public was somewhat surprised at it. It was generally supposed that Leibnitz had been admirably praised by Fontenelle, and that the subject was exhausted. But from the moment that Bailly's essay, crowned in Prussia, was published, former impressions were ...
— Biographies of Distinguished Scientific Men • Francois Arago
... whatever external object reminds him of such good, whether it remind him by arbitrary association, by typical resemblance, or by awakening intuitions of the divine attributes, which he was created to glorify and to enjoy eternally. Leibnitz says: ...
— The Continental Monthly, Vol. 4, No. 1, July, 1863 - Devoted to Literature and National Policy • Various
... to collate a vast amount of scientific evidence, from all branches of human knowledge, in support of these two abstract thoughts of Leibnitz and Hegel: "The present is the child of the past, but it is the parent of the future," and "Nothing is; everything is becoming." This demonstration had already been made in the case of geology by Lyell who substituted for the traditional catastrophic theory of cataclysmic changes, the ...
— Socialism and Modern Science (Darwin, Spencer, Marx) • Enrico Ferri
... historical, psychological, or philosophical point of view. His address on that occasion was masterly, and his conversation at various social functions instructive and pithy. I remember in one of them, especially, his delineation of the characteristics and services of Leibnitz, who was one of the founders of the Royal Academy, and it was perfection in that kind of conversation which is worthy of men claiming to possess immortal souls: for it brought out, especially, examples of Leibnitz's amazing forethought as to European policy, which seemed at times like ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... hope fully to answer within these pages, but it cannot be altogether passed over; we must know something of the nature of music, must have some clear notion of what it is if we are to understand its relation to language in the drama. The explanation given by Leibnitz that it is an exercitium arithmeticae occultum nescientis se numerare animi is quite inadequate. Music is not a purely intellectual affection like that of number and proportion, but is in the highest degree emotional. The pleasure which we receive from contemplating a mathematical process ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... solution of many others. Some of the greatest and most far-reaching scientific discoveries have been nothing else than a few correct definitions, a few just concepts and a few true propositions. Such, for example, was the work of Euclid, Newton and Leibnitz—a few correct definitions, a few just concepts, a few true propositions; but these have been extended and multiplied, sometimes by men of creative genius, and often almost automatically by men of merely good sense and ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... it, being obliged to keep his books in large chests. It was curious to see him and Dr Johnson together. Neither of them heard very distinctly; so each of them talked in his own way, and at the same time. Mr M'Lean said, he had a confutation of Bayle, by Leibnitz. JOHNSON. 'A confutation of Bayle, sir! What part of Bayle do you mean? The greatest part of his writings is not confutable: it is historical and critical.' Mr M'Lean said, 'the irreligious part'; and proceeded to talk of Leibnitz's controversy with Clarke, calling Leibnitz a great man. JOHNSON. ...
— The Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson, LL.D. • James Boswell
... science, we shall find that all who have most distinguished themselves in those walks have, at least, virtually admitted their own unfitness for the marriage tie by remaining in celibacy;—Newton, Gassendi, Galileo, Descartes, Bayle, Locke, Leibnitz, Boyle, Hume, and a long list of other illustrious sages, having all led ...
— Life of Lord Byron, Vol. III - With His Letters and Journals • Thomas Moore
... surface, but in depth. We have all of us observed in our own selves moments of obscure consciousness when we understand dimly, and moments of luminous consciousness which carry one almost to the very bottom of things. It is difficult to consider those in the wrong who admit, with Leibnitz, the existence of small states of consciousness. The lessening of the consciousness is already our means of understanding the unconscious; unconsciousness is the limit of ...
— The Mind and the Brain - Being the Authorised Translation of L'me et le Corps • Alfred Binet
... in; he must, he supposes, (and our beardless philosopher sighs as he says it) bear the penalty of a too restless intellect, and a too speculative genius; he knows all the usual arguments which satisfied Pascal, Butler, Bacon, Leibnitz; but they will do no longer: more radical, more tremendous difficulties have suggested themselves, 'from the 'depths of philosophy,' and far different ...
— Reason and Faith; Their Claims and Conflicts • Henry Rogers
... the wisdom of antiquity; but no one man's wisdom overrode the crowd. It was impossible to say even this,—that Hegel's success was the result of the symmetry of this theory. There were other equally symmetrical theories,—those of Descartes, Leibnitz, Fichte, Schopenhauer. There was but one reason why this doctrine won for itself, for a season, the belief of the whole world; and this reason was, that the deductions of that philosophy winked at people's weaknesses. These ...
— What To Do? - thoughts evoked by the census of Moscow • Count Lyof N. Tolstoi
... Nominalists and the Realists again!" exclaimed my learned friend, Sharon Turner, alluding to our modern doctrines on abstract ideas, on which there is still a doubt whether they are anything more than generalising terms.[42] Leibnitz confused his philosophy by the term sufficient reason: for every existence, for every event, and for every truth there must be a sufficient reason. This vagueness of language produced a perpetual misconception, ...
— Curiosities of Literature, Vol. 3 (of 3) • Isaac D'Israeli
... thing; and what we are not able to leave out of the idea can not be absent from the reality.(232) This assumption pervades the philosophy not only of Descartes, but of all the thinkers who received their impulse mainly from him, in particular the two most remarkable among them, Spinoza and Leibnitz, from whom the modern German metaphysical philosophy is essentially an emanation. I am indeed disposed to think that the fallacy now under consideration has been the cause of two-thirds of the bad philosophy, ...
— A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive • John Stuart Mill
... from the Greek—physician). This medical theory—as is the case with many scientific theories-was borrowed from another branch of science. The seventeenth century, the age of Isaac Newton, Galileo Galilei, Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibnitz, Rene Descartes, and other giants of physical science, was a period of remarkable progress in the field of physics. It is not surprising then that theorists in the field of medicine, noting the truths discovered by conceiving of nature ...
— Medicine in Virginia, 1607-1699 • Thomas P. Hughes
... failure, as characteristic of English, massive, practical good sense rather than as marked by real philosophical depth and refinement, such as Continental thinkers point to and are proud of in Descartes and Leibnitz. It is not even that a competent master of the whole domain of knowledge, Whewell, filled with the deepest sense of all that the world owes to Bacon, takes for granted that "though Bacon's general maxims are sagacious ...
— Bacon - English Men Of Letters, Edited By John Morley • Richard William Church
... is the mother who loves, because she has suffered. And this seems to be the great law of love. Not a triumph in art, literature, or jurisprudence—from the story of Homer to the odes of Horace, from the times of Bacon and Leibnitz to the days of Tyndall and Morse—that has not been obtained by toil and suffering! The mother of Anderson, having suffered so much in her loneliness and want, knew how to train her boy,—the joy of her life. And he in ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... complained of him to the magistrates, knowing that his condemnation and death would necessarily follow. He had neither the humanity of Luther nor the toleration of Saint Augustine. He was the impersonation of intellect,—like Newton, Leibnitz, Spinoza, and Kant,—which overbore the impulses of his heart. He had no passions except zeal for orthodoxy. So pre-eminently did intellect tower above the passions that he seemed to lack sympathy; and yet, such was his exalted character, he was capable of friendship. He was ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VI • John Lord
... Herr Leibnitz set him wondering uneasily what had taken the young German Crichton from Frankfort, and what he was about in Paris. They had had many a discussion in this little lodging, but he was not yet sure of the young man's single-mindedness. The contents of the letter were, however, ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... homogeneous, the highly heterogeneous bird being differentiated in it by the law of evolution. I cannot think what assured Spencer of this homogeneity in the egg, except the fact that perhaps it all tasted alike, which might seem good proof to a pure empiricist. Leibnitz, on the contrary, maintained that the organisation of nature was infinitely deep, every part consisting of an endless number of discrete elements. Here we may observe the difference between good philosophy and bad. The idea of Leibnitz ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... forgotten that on former occasions very confident judgments have been pronounced by very competent persons, which have not been finally ratified. Of the two great minds of the seventeenth century, Newton and Leibnitz, both profoundly religious as well as philosophical, one produced the theory of gravitation, the other objected to that theory that it was subversive of natural religion. The nebular hypothesis—a natural consequence of the ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... produced quite the reverse effect, detaching her from it for ever. After reading and enjoying Chateaubriand's book she set to work on the philosophers and essayists Mably, Locke, Condillac, Montesquieu, Bacon, Bossuet, Aristotle, Leibnitz, Pascal, Montaigne, and then turned to the poets and moralists La Bruyere, Pope, Milton, Dante, Virgil, Shakespeare, &c. But she was not a metaphysician; the tendencies of her mind did not impel her to seek for scientific solutions of the great mysteries. "J'etais," she ...
— Frederick Chopin as a Man and Musician - Volume 1-2, Complete • Frederick Niecks
... against William III., and which found expression in the works even of as free-minded a writer as La Bruyere. It is during the period of the fiercest struggle between Louis XIV. and William III. that Bossuet carried on with the German philosopher Leibnitz a series of negotiations, the object of which was the return to Catholicism of Protestant Germany. We need hardly state that the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... before it; that it did this good work by boldly observing and analysing facts; that this boldness towards facts increased in proportion as Europe became indoctrinated with the Jewish literature; and that, notably, such men as Kepler, Newton, Berkeley, Spinoza, Leibnitz, Descartes, in whatsoever else they differed, agreed in this, that their attitude towards Nature was derived from the teaching of the Jewish sages. I believe that we are not yet fully aware how much we owe to the Jewish mind, in the gradual ...
— Scientific Essays and Lectures • Charles Kingsley
... named Haveringemere, of which the peculiarity is, that if a person passing over it in a boat utters, in a loud voice, certain opprobrious words, a commotion arises in the waters and sinks the boat. The words, as printed in the edition of Leibnitz (Leibnitii Scriptores Brunsvicenses, tom. i. p. 990.), are "Prout haveringemere aut allethophe cunthefere;" which he explains to mean, "Phrut tibi, mare, et omnibus qui te transfretant." He adds with great simplicity: ...
— Notes and Queries, Number 184, May 7, 1853 • Various
... philosophic romance by Voltaire, and written in ridicule of the famous maxim of Leibnitz, "All for the best in the best of all possible worlds"; it is a sweeping satire, and "religion, political government, national manners, human weakness, ambition, love, loyalty, all ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... out again, and wrung from Pascal the famous outcry of despair in which the French language rose, perhaps for the last time, to the grand style of the twelfth century. To the twelfth century it belongs; to the century of faith and simplicity; not to the mathematical certainties of Descartes and Leibnitz and Newton, or to the mathematical abstractions of Spinoza. Descartes had proclaimed his famous conceptual proof of God: 'I am conscious of myself, and must exist; I am conscious of God and He must exist.' Pascal ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard |
