Note 19 — Chapter XVIII · GERMAN FREETHOUGHT IN THE SEVENTEENTH AND EIGHTEENTH CENTURIES

3. For a community in which the reading class was mainly clerical and scholastic, the seeds of rationalism were thus in part sown in the seventeenth century; but the ground was not yet propitious. Leibnitz (1646–1716), the chief thinker produced by Germany before Kant, lived in a state of singular intellectual isolation;19 and showed his sense of it by writing his philosophic treatises chiefly in French. One of the most widely learned men of his age, he was wont from his boyhood to grapple critically with every system of thought that came in his way; and, while claiming to be always eager to learn,20 he was as a rule strongly concerned to affirm his own powerful bias. Early in life he writes that it horrifies him to think how many men he has met who were at once intelligent and atheistic;21 and his propaganda is always dominated by the desire rather to confute unbelief than to find out the truth. As early as 1668 (aet. 22) he wrote an essay to that end, which was published as a Confessio naturæ contra Atheistas. Against Spinoza he reacted instantly and violently, pronouncing the Tractatus on its first (anonymous) appearance an “unbearably bold (licentiosum) book,” and resenting the Hobbesian criticism which it “dared to apply to sacred Scripture.”22 Yet in the next year we find him writing to Arnauld in earnest protest against the hidebound orthodoxy of the Church. “A philosophic age,” he declares, “is about to begin, in which the concern for truth, flourishing outside the schools, will spread even among politicians. Nothing is more likely to strengthen atheism and to upset faith, already so shaken by the attacks of great but bad men [a pleasing allusion to Spinoza], than to see on the one side the mysteries of the faith preached upon as the creed of all, and on the other hand become matter of derision to all, convicted of absurdity by the most certain rules of common reason. The worst enemies of the Church are in the Church. Let us take care lest the latest heresy—I will not say atheism, but—naturalism, be publicly professed.”23 For a time he seemed thus disposed to liberalize. He wrote to Spinoza on points of optics before he discovered the authorship; and he is represented later as speaking of the Tractatus with respect. He even visited Spinoza in 1676, and obtained a perusal of the manuscript of the Ethica; but he remained hostile to him in theology and philosophy. To the last he called Spinoza a mere developer of Descartes,24 whom he also habitually resisted.