Abstract
WE are assembled to-day in annual commemoration of a man whose marvellous breadth of view and extraordinary variety of interests are each time a fresh surprise to us. It seems incredible that the same hand could have penned the “Protogea” and the State-paper adjudging the Principality of Neufchâtel to the King of Prussia; or that the same mind could have conceived the infinitesimal calculus and the true measure of forces, as well as the pre-established harmony and the “Theodicea.” A closer examination, however, reveals a blank in the universality of his genius. We seek in vain for any connection with art, if we except the Latin poem composed by Leibnitz in praise of Brand's discovery of phosphorus. We need hardly mention that his “Ars Combinatoria” has nothing to do with the fine arts. In his letters and works, observations on the beautiful are few and far between; once he discusses more at length the pleasure excited by music, the cause of which he attributes to an equable, though invisible, order in the chordal vibrations, which “raiseth a sympathetic echo in our minds.” However, the world of the senses had little reality for Leibnitz. With his bodily eye he saw the Alps and the treasures of Italian art, but they conveyed nothing to his soul. He was indifferent to beauty; in short, we never surprise this Hercules at Omphale's distaff.
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On the Relation of Natural Science to Art.1 I. Nature 45, 200–204 (1891). https://doi.org/10.1038/045200a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/045200a0