inspires whom it finds. He who knows best to conspire with it has it.
Both philosophers swerved from their native simplicity and nobleness
of soul. Both sinned and were sinned against. Leibnitz did unhandsome
things, but he was sorely tried. His heart told him that the right
of the quarrel was on his side, and the general stupidity would not
see it. The general malice, rejoicing in aspersion of a noble name,
would not see it. The Royal Society would not see it,--nor France,
until long after Leibnitz's death. Sir David Brewster's account of
the matter, according to the German authorities, Gerhardt, Guhrauer,
and others, is one-sided, and sins by _suppressio veri_, ignoring
important documents, particularly Leibnitz's letter to Oldenburg,
August 27, 1676. Gerhardt has published Leibnitz's own history of
the Calculus as a counter-statement. [10] But even from Brewster's
account, as we remember it, (we have it not by us at this writing.)
there is no more reason to doubt that Leibnitz's discovery was
independent of Newton's than that Newton's was independent of
Leibnitz's. The two discoveries, in fact, are not identical; the end
and application are the same, but origin and process differ, and the
German method has long superseded the English. The question in debate
has been settled by supreme authority. Leibnitz has been tried by his
peers. Euler, Lagrange, Laplace, Poisson, and Biot have honorably
acquitted him of plagiarism, and reinstated him in his rights as true
discoverer of the Differential Calculus.

[Footnote 10: Historia et Oriffo Calculi Differenttalis, a G. G.
LEIBNITIO conscripts.]

[Transcriber's note: this controversy rages in academia to this day.]

The one distinguishing trait of Leibnitz's genius, and the one