Essays on Theodicy

THE LIFE

him, his mother was a woman of merit, who took care to inspire in him all the sentiments of virtue of which he was capable, and who neglected nothing to cultivate the dispositions for the Sciences In this context, "Sciences" refers broadly to all branches of knowledge and learning, including the humanities. that were first discovered in him.

She sent him to the school known in Leipzig as the School of St. Nicholas, where Jean Horshuchius Johann Hornschuch (1599–1663), a German philologist. and Tileman Bachusius Tilemann Backhaus (1624–1666), a German theologian and educator. taught him the principles of the Latin and Greek languages. That is almost all he learned, or wished to learn, from them; for as soon as he knew enough to understand the authors who wrote in those two languages, he resolved to free himself from the childish exercises in which youth spend and waste fine years that could be put to useful employment. The reflections of the young Leibnitz, already strong and solid at an age when other men barely think—or at least think only of games and amusements—made him feel the danger of this method; and despite the remonstrances of his tutors, who were usually very narrow-minded and blind followers of the beaten path, he set himself to read the Classical authors of both languages in private, especially the Histories of Livy and the poetry of Virgil.

His readings in his early youth.

Thus Mr. Leibnitz did by instinct what the most skilled masters have advised others to do by reason. The elegance, the purity, the noble simplicity