2. The meagre German literature of this early period was also an important factor in the development of the Enlightenment. Poor, indeed, it was. Never was German literary production so low. Before the war the Germans had taken Greek as their model; after the war they copied the language, manners, and methods of the French of Louis XIV. The early literature was ruled in the same spirit of absolutism by Opitz until 1700, and after him by Gottsched, especially in the years from 1730 to 1740. It was for only a small fraction of the people, and was in the interests of the depraved aristocrats of the courts. Such pedantic absolutism was the basis of the reaction in the next period of the literary Enlightenment, which proved the redemption of Germany. 3. The Pietistic movement was the third factor that went to make up the German Enlightenment. It was a positive expression of religious individualism, similar in its position to the Prussian state in its independent growth in politics. It was a religious movement outside the church. Its two leaders were Spener (1635–1705) and Francke (1663–1727). The movement entered Germany from the Netherlands; and the members were devout and holy men consecrated to good deeds. The Pietists were not heroic figures like the early Lutherans, but they stood for what Luther had in his early period taught. They opposed ecclesiastical formalism, and they proclaimed the need of personal regeneration and of the universal priesthood. They stood for religious freedom. They made no onslaught upon the church, but they were content with saving individuals. Pietism united at first with Rationalism――of which we shall next speak――against orthodoxy, but when the two had won their victory they quarreled. Although the Pietistic movement later became itself conventional, it furnished the ground for the religious freedom of the Enlightenment. During these hundred years of German religious absolutism, the Pietists represent the moral activity among religious bodies. 4. The chief source of the Enlightenment was the philosophy of Leibnitz. In turning back to the life of this distinguished German the reader will remember that he was the “first scientist in two hundred years,” and that he was the Rationalist who presaged the Enlightenment. Leibnitz was born in 1646, just two years before the war closed, and he died in 1716, one year after the death of Louis XIV. He lived during those unfruitful years after the war and before the Enlightenment; and his philosophy stands out prominently from the low plane of the intellectual activity of that time. In 1686 he completed the construction of his philosophy by introducing the conception of the individual as a dynamic centre.