Leibnitz enjoyed such means of education as Germany afforded at that
time, but declares himself, for the most part, self-taught [6].

[Footnote 6: "Duo, ihi profuere mirifice, (quae tamen alioqui ambigna,
et pluribus noxia esse solent,) primum quod fere essem [Greek:
autodidaktos], alterum quod quaererem nova in unaquaque scientia."
--LEIBNIT. _Opera Philosoph_. Erdmann. p. 162.]

So genius must always be, for want of any external stimulus equal to
its own impulse. No normal training could keep pace with his
abnormal growth. No school discipline could supply the fuel
necessary to feed the consuming fire of that ravenous intellect.
Grammars, manuals, compends,--all the apparatus of the classes,--
were only oil to its flame. The Master of the Nicolai-Schule in
Leipzig, his first instructor, was a steady practitioner of the
Martinet order. The pupils were ranged in classes corresponding to
their civil ages,--their studies graduated according to the
baptismal register. It was not a question of faculty or proficiency,
how a lad should be classed and what he should read, but of calendar
years. As if a shoemaker should fit his last to the age instead of
the foot. Such an age, such a study. Gottfried is a genius, and Hans
is a dunce; but Gottfried and Hans were both born in 1646;
consequently, now, in 1654, they are both equally fit for the
Smaller Catechism. Leibnitz was ready for Latin long before the time
allotted to that study in the Nicolai-Schule, but the system was
inexorable. All access to books cut off by rigorous proscription.
But the thirst for knowledge is not easily stifled, and genius, like
love, "will find out his way."

He chanced, in a corner of the house, to light on an odd volume of