THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE, AND LEIB- 

 NITZ'S IDEAS. 



WHILE science in our day is pouring unexpected floods 

 of light upon the solution of those problems which are at 

 once the highest and the most subtile in natural philoso- 

 phy, the great systems of metaphysics become an interest- 

 ing subject of review. Forgotten or despised by a science 

 wholly devoted to experiment, given over to the routine 

 judgment of unprogressive criticism, those systems had 

 ceased to have any worth except as proofs and records of 

 laborious study. Subjected to fresh investigation and 

 searching exposition, they now reveal proportions worthy 

 the attention of the savant, who may find in them conclu- 

 sions expressed with a breadth that can cover the wider 

 range of the results he has himself reached. A movement 

 of this kind in favor of the philosophy of Leibnitz is just 

 now taking place. The buried germs of that philosophy 

 had long been slowly developing, under the brooding 

 thought of later science, and we find them now breaking 

 forth with singular power of life. The conception of spir- 

 itual and material principles formed by the Hanoverian 

 thinker seeming indisputably the most probable and plau- 

 sible one, we are forced to give up our settled and accepted 

 ideas as to those things, and to adopt another, confessed 

 by scientists and metaphysicians alike to be effective in 

 removing many difficulties. Nor does that correspondence 

 between the maxims of Leibnitz and the results of most 



