ialistic and atheistic doctrines. By
vindicating with fervid eloquence the participation of the whole man in
the highest questions, in opposition to the one-sided illumination of the
understanding, he became a pre-Kantian defender of the faith of practical
reason. His emphatic summons aroused a loud and lasting echo, especially in
Germany, in the hearts of Goethe, Kant, and Fichte.

CHAPTER VII.

LEIBNITZ.

In the contemporaries Spinoza and Locke, the two schools of modern
philosophy, the Continental, starting from Descartes, and the English,
which followed Bacon, had reached the extreme of divergence and opposition,
Spinoza was a rationalistic pantheist, Locke, an empirical individualist.
With Leibnitz a twofold approximation begins. As a rationalist he sides
with Spinoza against Locke, as an individualist with Locke against Spinoza.
But he not only separated rationalism from pantheism, but also qualified
it by the recognition (which his historical tendencies had of themselves
suggested to him) of a relative justification for empiricism, since he
distinguished the factual truths of experience from the necessary truths of
reason, gave to the former a noetical principle of their own, the principle
of sufficient reason, and made sensation an indispensable step to thought.

To the tendencies thus manifested toward a just estimation and peaceful
reconciliation of opposing standpoints, Leibnitz remained true in all the
fields to which he devoted his activity. Thus, in the sphere of religion,
he took an active part in the negotiations looking toward the reunion of
the Protestant and Catholic Churches, as well as in those concerning the
union of the Lutheran and the Reformed. Himself a stimulating man, he yet
needed stimulation from without. He was an astonishingly wide reader, and
declared that he had never found a book that did not contain something
of value. With a ready adaptability to the ideas of others he combined a
remarkable power of transformative appropriation; he read into books more
than stood written in them. The versatility of his genius was unlimited:
jurist, historian, diplomat, mathematician, physical scientist, and
philosopher, and in addition almost a theologian and a philologist--he is
not only at home in all these departments, because versed in them, but
everywhere contributes to their advancement by original ideas and plans. In
such a combination of productive genius and wealth of knowledge Aristot