Leibgeber

“ This species of careful watch over his feelings was a process which made Leibgeber blush with shame, and drove him nearly frantic; and, indeed, he would have thrown even this description of mine of it into the fire. I am given to understand that he never could bring himself to utter the word “heart” even to women—who always have their heart (namely the word) on their tongues, like a kind of globus hystericus. He said, “It is the bullet-screw of their real hearts,—the button on their fanfoil; and, to me, it is a poison bolus, a pitch-ball for the Bel of Babel.” ”

“ And at this moment, a flash of such brilliance illumined the heavens, and such a shattering peal of thunder followed close upon it, that, stretching out her hand to him, she said, “I will do anything and everything you wish me to do; only, for Heaven’s sake, be a God-fearing man again! I will even give Leibgeber my hand; yes, and a kiss too, if I must—no matter whether he has washed his face after the dog’s licking it, or not—and I shall neither listen, nor mind, when you say what a delightful, beautiful place the silvery, flowery Bayreuth Fantaisie is.” ”

“ Pardon me this frankness,”—a fresh pang at this shadowing of Leibgeber cut across his brow, and it was with difficulty that he could allow his patron to finish his explanation. “But this is not a shortcoming in my eyes, dear Leibgeber: on the contrary, it is an excellence. We ought not to go on eternally mourning for the dead; if we grieve at all, it should be for the living. And even the latter species of grief may come to an end with you next week, for then I expect my daughter, and” (he spoke here very deliberately) “her friend Nathalie with her. ”

“ Firmian, however, notwithstanding his intoxication of mind, retained sufficient control over himself to think, at least, of the risk which Leibgeber would run in this transaction. “Suppose,” said he, “anybody should come across my dear real Heinrich (whose name I steal) in the vicinity of me, a coiner of false names, what then?
“Nobody ever will,” said Heinrich, “for as soon as you have re-assumed your own canonical name of Leibgeber, and given up ‘Firmian Stanislaus,’ which was conferred upon me at such a stormy baptismal font (and Heaven grant you may do so!) ”

“ It struck him—he went on to say, that, now that his Inspector had entered upon his duties, he was no longer quite so gay and full of humour as he had found him to be of old, but rather (if he might speak openly) downcast at times, and over-sentimental. Yet he had formerly said himself (but this was the other Leibgeber) that he would rather hear a man swear at a mischance than lament over it; and that one might have his feet sticking in the winter, and his nose in the spring, and smell a flower, though in the midst of snow. ”

“ At half an hour after midnight—when neither bat nor night-watchman, nor beer-guest from the public-house, nor night-light was any longer to be seen; and only a field-cricket here and there could be heard in the sheaves, and a mouse or two in the houses—Leibgeber said to his sad and anxious friend, “March, now! Since you shuffled off this mortal coil, and entered into eternity, you have not known a moment of happiness or peace. All the rest is my affair. Wait for me at Hof on the Saale. We must see each other yet once more after death.” Firmian fell in silence on his burning face, and wept. ”

“ Heaven is above us, peaceful and quiet, gladsome, serene, and warm.” For that very reason, he had not the courage to ask after those he had left behind, particularly his widow. Leibgeber expressed great joy that he had caught him up four post-stations on that side of Hof, and all the more that, this being so, they could be together for a good long while before they must part in Hof (which latter was the very point which he was anxious to establish and emphasise) . ”

“ They found Nathalie in the open temple, with some papers in her hand. “I bring you our author of the ‘Selections from the Devil’s Papers,’” said Leibgeber, “which I see you are just reading; will you allow me to introduce him to you?” After a passing blush at having mistaken Siebenkæs for Leibgeber, in Fantaisie, she said to him, very kindly and pleasantly, “It would take very little to make me mistake you for your friend again, Mr. Siebenkæs; and you seem almost exactly alike in mind, as well as in body. Your satire is often exactly like his ”

“ A Narisker not without some brains, and possessing a good memory, who was not aware that I had the fellow under my historical hands, repeated the following somewhat audacious utterances of Leibgeber’s.
“Every man is a born pedant. There are very few who are hung in chains after they are dead: but almost every one is hung, in most accursed chains, before death; and, therefore, in most countries, ‘Freeman’ means provost-marshal, or hangman. Jest, as such, ought to be serious; therefore, as long as one is only in jest, it is wrong to jest in the slightest degree. ”

“ His heart beat quicker at every street. It was quite a pleasure to him to lose his way a little, as to some extent delaying and adding to his happiness. At length he attained his perihelion—that is to say—reached the Sun (Hotel) , where was the metallic sun which had attracted to it his comet, as the astronomical sun does comets in general. He inquired the number of Leibgeber’s room; they said it was number 8, at the back of the house, but that he had gone that day on a trip into Swabia, unless he was still upstairs. ”

“ The whole history of the early years of Leibnitz forms a precious record of what we might call speculative experience. It reveals the self-educating genius of the really original mind, and shows a singular development of abstract thought at an age when the attention is usually engrossed with the objects of sense. ”

“ In 1666 Leibniz should have received his double doctorate of philosophy and of law; but petty jealousies and personal fears prevented his presenting himself for the examination. Disgusted with his treatment, feeling that the ties that bound him to Leipzig were severed by the recent death of his mother, anxious to study mathematics further, and, as he confesses, desiring, with the natural eagerness of youth, to see more of the world, he left Leipzig forever, and entered upon his Wanderjahre. He was prepared to be no mean citizen of the world. ”

“ Leibnitz may claim the further merit of having himself almost created that science, and given it forth, a new Minerva, in its full and perfect development. There is hardly a principle of modern philology the germ of which may not be discovered in his singularly pregnant and suggestive essays and letters; and, what is far more remarkable, he has often, with the instinctive sagacity of original genius, anticipated sometimes by conjecture, sometimes by positive prediction, analogies and results which the investigations of actual explorers have since realized. ”

“ This last harmony links the theological with the merely philosophical part of the system of Leibnitz; and introduces us to his philosophy of religion. A question may be asked,—If the universe—moral as well as physical—is a self-regulating machine, is not the Creator seemingly excluded from the government of His creation; and, if not thus excluded, how is He related to the sin and misery which it contains? That the apparent manner of His relations to the creation should be what it is, results, he thinks, from our relative knowledge, which can never rise superior to the condition of time. ”

“ The development of his speculative genius continued to advance, and his thoughts, stirred from their lowest depths by the cycle of the sciences during that whole period, would present an exceedingly curious spectacle, if we could have these changes in the current of the soul represented to the senses. History, languages, geology, mathematics, chemistry, medicine, politics, and theology, in turn secured his attention, and his busy spirit collected the various learning of each department. ”

“ Leibniz’s conception relative to this is, as we have seen, that there is no physical influxus, or commercium, of monads, but ideal consensus. Really each shuts out every other; ideally, or representatively, it includes every other. His positive thought in the matter is that a complete knowledge of any portion of the universe would involve a perfect knowledge of the whole, so organic is the structure of the universe. Each monad sums up the past history of the world, and is big with its future. This is the conception of inter-relation ”

“ Leibniz culminates his discussion of classification as a method of translating the empirical into the rational, by pointing out that it rests upon the law of continuity; and that this law contains two factors,—one equivalent to the axiom of the Realists, that nature is nowhere empty; the other, to that of the Nominalists, that nature does nothing uselessly. “One of these principles seems to make nature a prodigal, the other a miser; and yet both are true if properly understood,” says Leibniz. “Nature is like a good manager, sparing where it is necessary, in order to be magnificent. ”

“ We fear we may not have succeeded in rendering very intelligible, and far less in rendering attractive, the nature and scope of the most comprehensive question in philosophy. After any attempted statement of it, the consequent experience of the insufficiency of the words of ordinary language for these refined purposes, must invest with interest the splendid project by Leibnitz himself of a universal language, of which the alphabet should indicate the few original ideas with which all the rest of our knowledge is connected ”

“ But if we will put ourselves in the position of Leibniz, and behold, not the new planet, but the new universe, so one, so linked together, swimming into our ken, we shall feel something of the same exultant thrill that Leibniz felt,—an exultation not indeed personal in its nature, but which arises from the expansion of the human mind face to face with an expanding world. ”

“ Let Leibniz speak for himself:—
"Each portion of matter is not only infinitely divisible, but is also actually subdivided without end.... Whence it appears that in the smallest particle of matter there is a world of creatures, living beings, animals, entelechies, souls. Each portion of matter may be conceived as like a garden full of plants, or like a pond full of fishes.... Thus there is nothing fallow, nothing sterile, nothing dead in the universe...." ”

“ Among all the philosophers, Leibniz is one of those who have felt most vividly what a personality is; for before all, the nomad is a personal and autonomous being. Yet, for Leibniz, the contents of all the monads is identical. In fact, all are consciousnesses which express one and the same object, the world; and as the world itself is only a system of representations, each particular consciousness is really only the reflection of the universal consciousness. ”

“ It is not true that the Binomial Theorem is also engraved on it.
We pass to Leibniz, the second and independent inventor of the calculus. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716) was born in Leipzig. No period in the history of any civilised nation could have been less favourable for literary and scientific pursuits than the middle of the seventeenth century in Germany. Yet circumstances seem to have happily combined to bestow on the youthful genius an education hardly otherwise obtainable during this darkest period of German history. ”

“ They extend so widely as to comprehend only a few of the qualities of each of the objects that they include. The fact is, they reached too far to become at once familiar to the minds of men. The real spirit of the Leibnitzian philosophy slumbered for more than half a century, during which his nominal scholars under Wolff were starving on the subtleties of a severe yet profitless dialectic, and were evincing that dislike for really vigorous thought which is indicated by the pedantry of an empty imposing philosophical nomenclature. ”

“ According to Leibnitz, as nearly as he seems willing to be understood, the monad has body without bulk, and mind without manifestation -- Leibnitz knows him by the innate power of considering. He has founded upon him a theory of the universe, which the creature bears without resentment, for the monad is a gentleman. Small as he is, the monad contains all the powers and possibilities needful to his evolution into a German philosopher of the first class -- altogether a very capable little fellow. ”

“ The controversy between the Aristotelians and the Ramists in the sixteenth century had, moreover, diverted men's minds from the production of a Philosophy altogether modern and reformed. The birth of Leibnitz was just subsequent to the time when, the strength of the evangelical movement having unhappily abated in most countries, a movement towards a reform of Philosophy had succeeded. The mind is not likely at any time to be strongly stirred in a science like Theology, without being directed to "the science of sciences." ”

“ That philosophy has to encounter the opposition of three contrary idealistic hypotheses, according to one of which all created existence is resolved, with Leibnitz, into spiritual substances of different orders, and material phenomena are regarded as merely resulting from these immaterial elements—according to a second, the material world is conceived as a series of ideas produced immediately and in regular order by God in the minds of men—according to a third, as a group of the phenomena of our own minds, regulated by an unknown principle. ”