616 PHILOSOPHICAL THOUGHT. 



religious, ecclesiastical, political, and scientific, were so 

 prominent and absorbing that the time had not yet 

 arrived for accepting a dogmatic system produced by a 

 solitary thinker, who had retired from contact with the 

 world and acquired that serenity of mind to which the 

 loud assertions of opposed parties presented themselves 

 merely as different modes of one and the same highest 

 truth. Nor had the different existing beliefs in various 

 regions lost that vitality the absence of which would 

 have prepared the thinking and searching mind for 

 the reception of a new truth. In one word, reconcilia- 

 tion of the many scattered views and theories was 

 more wanted than the construction of a new doctrine 

 and theory of life. Thus it came about that the spirit 

 of conciliation, with an optimistic belief in its possibility, 

 which characterised Leibniz' work, was more acceptable 

 and became more popular. 



The endeavour to carry out the system which its 

 author had only adumbrated, and to convert it into a 

 teachable doctrine, became the task of the followers 

 of Leibniz, of whom Christian Wolff was the most 

 industrious and successful. The result of Wolff's 

 labours, however, soon proved to be unsatisfactory : the 

 best ideas of Leibniz were on the point of being lost ; 

 the work of reconciliation, the higher synthesis, turned 

 out to be merely a shallow compromise. A dry 

 formalism, easy to teach but destructive of the spirit 

 of Leibniz' philosophy, was introduced, which, in the 

 sequel, tended to make philosophy trivial and ridiculous, 

 or to reduce it merely to the dicta of common-sense. 

 The deeper truths which lay hidden in the world of 



