GOTTFRIED WILHELM LEIBNIZ was born at Leipzig
on 21 June, 1646, two years before the end of the Thirty
Years War. His father, who was Professor of Moral
Philosophy at the University of Leipzig, died when Leib-
niz was six years old. His mother is said to have been a
woman of great piety, and she seems to have devoted
much care and thought to his education and training. She
also died at an early age, before her son had finished his
studies at the University.

Not satisfied with what he was taught at school, Leib-
niz struggled with an illustrated copy of Livy which he
had found in the house, piecing together the little Latin
he knew with what he saw in the pictures. His mother,
impressed by this precocity, and after careful considera-
tion of the dangers of such a course, made Leibniz free
of his father's library. He went from book to book, find-
ing, as he tells us, something to his purpose in all of them.
He chose first the ancients, Cicero, Seneca, Pliny, Hero-
dotus, Xenophon, Plato, then the historians of the Roman
Empire and the Fathers of the Church. Of these he tells us
that he understood at first nothing, then gradually some-
thing, and finally enough. From them, as he says, he
learned ever to seek clearness in words and usefulness in
the matter, in verbis claritas, in rebus usus. At thirteen, he
was introduced to the study of logic at school and found
himself 'greatly excited by the division and order of
thoughts which I perceived therein. I took the greatest

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