8 INTRODUCTION 



in 1676. There can be no doubt that Newton was in 

 possession of a similar method as early as 1665. He at 

 first made known only some of the results of the method, 

 and not the method itself. Hence an attempt has been 

 made to show that Leibniz got hints of the method 

 during his first visit to England, and that he was thus 

 more or less a plagiarist of Newton. But there is nothing 

 to confirm this, and a full consideration makes it much 

 more likely that each discovered the method indepen- 

 dently. Leibniz published his account of the method in 

 1684 : Newton's was first published in 1693. To Newton 

 belongs the glory of priority, whatever that may be 

 worth ; while the form which Leibniz gave to the Cal- 

 culus, the names and the signs which he used, have come 

 to be universally employed in preference to those of 

 Newton l . 



Visit to Spinoza. 



Shortly before Leibniz went to London, Boineburg 

 died ; and the visit to London was unexpectedly brought 

 to an end in March, 1673, by the death of the Archbishop 

 of Mainz. Leibniz was now without an official position, 

 and during the next few years he made various unsuc- 

 cessful attempts to obtain a diplomatic appointment. At 

 last, in 1676, he somewhat reluctantly accepted the post 

 of librarian to the Duke of Brunswick at Hanover, which 

 was to be his home during the remainder of his life. 

 During the earlier years of his residence in Paris, Leibniz 

 had given much attention to the philosophy of Descartes 

 and the Cartesians, with the result that he became more 

 and more convinced of its insufficiency 2 . In his en- 



1 See Merz, Leibniz (Blackwood's Philosophical Classics), ch. iii. 

 and v. Cf. Guhrauer's Leibnitz, i. 170 sqq. 



2 A few years after (in 1679) Leibniz writes to Philipp : 'As to 

 the philosophy of Descartes I have no hesitation in saying abso- 

 lutely that it leads to atheism' (G. iv. 281). And in the same 

 year he writes to Malebranche that, while in many respects he 

 admires Descartes, he is * convinced that his mechanics is full of 



