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 
