It is somewhat significant that one whose tendency was conciliatory, who was eminently what the Germans delight to call him, a "mediator," attempting to unite the varied truths which he found scattered in opposed systems, should have had so much of his work called forth by controversy. Aside from the cases just mentioned, his other chief work, the Theodicy, is, in form, a reply to Bayle. Many of his minor pieces are replies to criticism or are developments of his own thought with critical reference to Descartes, Malebranche, and others. But Leibniz has a somewhat different attitude towards his British and towards his Continental opponents. With the latter he was always in sympathy, while they in turn gave whatever he uttered a respectful hearing. Their mutual critiques begin and end in compliments. But the Englishmen found the thought of Leibniz "paradoxical" and forced. It seemed to them wildly speculative, and indeed arbitrary guess-work, without any special reason for its production, and wholly unverifiable in its results. Such has been the fate of much of the best German thought since that time in the land of the descendants of Newton and Locke. But Leibniz, on the other hand, felt as if he were dealing, in philosophical matters at least, with foemen hardly worthy of his steel. Locke, he says, had subtlety and address, and a sort of _superficial_ metaphysics; but he was ignorant of the method of mathematics,--that is to say, from the standpoint of Leibniz, of the method of all science. We have already seen that he thought the examination of a work which had been the result of the continued labor of Locke was a matter for the leisure hours of his courtly visits. Indeed, he would undoubtedly have felt about it what he actually expressed regarding his controversy with Clarke,--that he engaged in it "Ludus et jocus, quia in philosophia Omnia percepi atque animo mecum ante peregi." He regarded the English as superficial and without grasp of principles, as they thought him over-deep and over-theoretical.