Germany, with all her wealth of erudite celebrities, has produced no other who fulfils so completely the type of the _Gelehrte_,--a type which differs from that of the _savant_ and from that of the scholar, but includes them both. Feuerbach calls him "the personified thirst for Knowledge"; Frederic the Great pronounced him an "Academy of Sciences"; and Fontenelle said of him, that "he saw the end of things, or that they had no end." It was an age of intellectual adventure into which Leibnitz was born,--fit sequel and heir to the age of maritime adventure which preceded it. We please ourselves with fancied analogies between the two epochs and the nature of their discoveries. In the latter movement, as in the former, Italy took the lead. The martyr Giordano Bruno was the brave Columbus of modern thought,--the first who broke loose from the trammels of mediaeval ecclesiastical tradition, and reported a new world beyond the watery waste of scholasticism. Campanella may represent the Vespucci of the new enterprise; Lord Bacon its Sebastian Cabot,--the "Novum Organum" being the Newfoundland of modern experimental science. Des Cartes was the Cortés, or shall we rather say the Ponce de Leon, of scientific discovery, who, failing to find what he sought,--the Principle of Life, (the Fountain of Eternal Youth,)--yet found enough to render his name immortal and to make mankind his debtor. Spinoza is the spiritual Magalhaens, who, emerging from the straits of Judaism, beheld "Another ocean's breast immense, unknown." Of modern thinkers he was "----the first That ever burst Into that silent sea." He discovered the Pacific of philosophy,--that theory of the sole Divine Substance, the All-One, which Goethe in early life found so pacifying to his troubled spirit, and which, vague and barren as it proves on nearer acquaintance, induces at first, above all other systems, a sense of repose in illimitable vastness and immutable necessity.