dinner. A hundred hexameters, or fifty distichs, in a day, is
generally considered a fair _pensum_ for a boy of sixteen at a
German gymnasium.

At the age of seventeen, he produced, as an academic exercise, on
taking the degree of Bachelor of Philosophy, his celebrated treatise
on the Principle of Individuality, "De Principle Individui," the
most extraordinary performance ever achieved by a youth of that age,--
remarkable for its erudition, especially its intimate knowledge of
the writings of the Schoolmen, and equally remarkable for its
vigorous grasp of thought and its subtile analysis. In this essay
Leibnitz discovered the bent of his mind and prefigured his future
philosophy, in the choice of his theme, and in his vivid appreciation
and strenuous positing of the individual as the fundamental
principle of ontology. He takes Nominalistic ground in relation to
the old controversy of Nominalist and Realist, siding with Abelard
and Roscellin and Occam, and against St. Thomas and Duns Scotus. The
principle of individuation, he maintains, is the entire entity of
the individual, and not mere limitation of the universal, whether by
"Existence" or by "_Haecceity_." [7] John and Thomas are individuals
by virtue of their integral humanity, and not by fractional limitation
of humanity. Dobbin is an actual positive horse (_Entitas tota_).
Not a negation, by limitation, of universal equiety (_Negatio_).
Not an individuation, by actual existence, of a non-existent but
essential and universal horse (_Existentia_). Nor yet a horse
only by limitation of kind,--a horse minus Dick and Bessie and the
brown mare, etc. (_Haecceitas_). But an individual horse,
simply by virtue of his equine nature. Only so far as he is an actual
complete horse, is he an individual at all. (_Per quod quid est,
per id unum numero est_.) His individuality is nothing superadded