or that they had no end." It was an age of intellectual adventure
into which Leibnitz was born,--fit sequel and heir to the age of
maritime adventure which preceded it. We please ourselves with
fancied analogies between the two epochs and the nature of their
discoveries. In the latter movement, as in the former, Italy took
the lead. The martyr Giordano Bruno was the brave Columbus of modern
thought,--the first who broke loose from the trammels of mediaeval
ecclesiastical tradition, and reported a new world beyond the watery
waste of scholasticism. Campanella may represent the Vespucci of the
new enterprise; Lord Bacon its Sebastian Cabot,--the "Novum Organum"
being the Newfoundland of modern experimental science. Des Cartes
was the Cortes, or shall we rather say the Ponce de Leon, of
scientific discovery, who, failing to find what he sought,--the
Principle of Life, (the Fountain of Eternal Youth,)--yet found
enough to render his name immortal and to make mankind his debtor.
Spinoza is the spiritual Magalhaens, who, emerging from the straits
of Judaism, beheld

"Another ocean's breast immense, unknown."

Of modern thinkers he was

"----the first
That ever burst
Into that silent sea."

He discovered the Pacific of philosophy,--that theory of the sole
Divine Substance, the All-One, which Goethe in early life found so
pacifying to his troubled spirit, and which, vague and barren as it
proves on nearer acquaintance, induces at first, above all other