To write a complete account of the influence of Leibniz's philosophy would be too large a task for these pages. If we were to include under this head all the ramifications of thought to which Leibniz stimulated, directly and indirectly, either by stating truths which some one worked out or by stating errors which incited some one to new points of view, we should have to sketch German philosophy since his time,--and not only the professional philosophy, but those wide aspects of thought which were reflected in Herder, Lessing, and Goethe. It is enough to consider him as the forerunner of Kant. It has become so customary to represent Kant as working wholly on the problem which Hume presented, that his great indebtedness to Leibniz is overlooked. Because Hume aroused Kant from his dogmatic slumbers, it is supposed that Kant threw off the entire influence of the Leibnizian thought as vain dreams of his sleep. Such a representation is one-sided. It is truer to state that Hume challenged Kant to discover the method by which he could justify the results of Leibniz. In this process, the results, no doubt, took on a new form: results are always relative to method; but Kant never lost sight of the results. In the main, he accepted the larger features of the Leibnizian conclusions, and, taught by Hume of the insufficiency of the method that Leibniz followed, searched for a method which should guarantee them. This aspect of Kant appears more fully in his lesser and somewhat controversial writings than in his classic works: and this, no doubt, is one reason that his indebtedness is so often overlooked. His close relation to Leibniz appears most definitely in his _brochure_ entitled "Concerning a Discovery which renders Unnecessary all Critique of Pure Reason." A Wolffian, Eberhard by name, had "made the discovery" (to use Kant's words) "that the Leibnizian philosophy contained a critique of reason just as well as the modern, and accordingly contained everything that is true in the latter, and much else in addition." In his reply to this writing, Kant takes the position that those who claimed to be Leibnizians simply repeated the words of Leibniz without penetrating into his spirit, and that consequently they misrepresented him on every important point. He, Kant, on the other hand, making no claim to use the terminology of Leibniz, was his true continuator, since he had only changed the doctrine of the latter so as to make it conform to the true intent of Leibniz, by removing its self-contradictions. He closes: "'The Critique of Pure Reason' may be regarded as the real apology for Leibniz, even against his own professed followers."