[Footnote 13: KORTHOLT. _Epistolae ad Diversos_, Vol. I.]



LEIBNITZ'S PHILOSOPHY.

The interest to us in this extraordinary man--who died at Hanover,
1716, in the midst of his labors and projects--turns mainly on his
speculative philosophy. It was only as an incidental pursuit that he
occupied himself with metaphysic; yet no philosopher since Aristotle--
with whom, though claiming to be more Platonic than Aristotelian, he
has much in common--has furnished more luminous hints to the
elucidation of metaphysical problems. The problems he attempted were
those which concern the most inscrutable, but, to the genuine
metaphysician, most fascinating of all topics, the nature of
substance, matter and spirit, absolute being,--in a word,
_Ontology_. This department of metaphysic, the most interesting,
and, _agonistically_ [14], the most important branch of that study,
has been deliberately, purposely, and, with one or two exceptions,
uniformly avoided by the English metaphysicians so-called, with
Locke at their head, and equally by their Scottish successors, until
the recent "Institutes" of the witty Professor of St. Andrew's.
Locke's "Essay concerning the Human Understanding," a century and
a half ago, diverted the English mind from metaphysic proper into
what is commonly called Psychology, but ought, of right, to be termed
_Noology_, or "Philosophy of the Human Mind," as Dugald Stewart
entitled his treatise. This is the study which has usually taken the
place of metaphysic at Cambridge and other colleges,--the science that
professes to show "how ideas enter the mind"; which, considering the