Leibniz by Maria Rosa Antognazza

Author:Maria Rosa Antognazza [Antognazza]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Published: 2014-05-11T16:00:00+00:00

Return to Hanover (March–June 1690)

On 30 March, Leibniz was in Innsbruck.175 He next stopped in Augsburg to visit Gottlieb Spitzel, delivering parcels of books from Magliabechi. In Passau he called on his friend Philipp Wilhelm von Hörnigk, who in the meantime had become archivist to the local prince-bishop.176 In Augsburg orders from Ernst August apparently caught up with Leibniz, instructing him to make a detour to Vienna, where some sort of court business needed his attention. Needless to say, Leibniz responded with exemplary devotion to duty, not least because he had left there part of his papers and luggage. As he explained jokingly to Sophie, he was particularly anxious personally to see his papers safely home: “if I carried as much coins as I carried papers, I would have more cash than the Emperor's Chamber”.177 During his briefer second visit to the imperial city from the end of April to the middle of May, he was prompted by the objections of Denis Papin to his physical theories to write a paper on the cause of gravity and in defence of his anti-Cartesian demonstrations.178 The paper was published in the Acta Eruditorum in the same issue of May 1690 in which the mathematician Jakob Bernoulli used the differential notation and introduced the term “integral” – this latter only reluctantly adopted by Leibniz because it seemed to him to obscure the sense of the operation.179 In Vienna he also explored the possibility of reviving the offer of the office of historiographer, provided that a clarification could be given regarding his status at the Imperial court.180 Alas, no such clarification came. After a last visit to Bishop Rojas during which the next steps to be taken in the negotiation of ecclesiastical reunification were discussed,181 Leibniz departed from Vienna. Having discarded the initial plan of travelling back via Karlsbad where Ernst August was staying in that period, he took the route passing through Prague and Dresden.182 The route skirted also Leipzig, but Leibniz (who had missed no opportunity to see his friends and acquaintances everywhere else) did not see fit this time to stop to visit his relatives183 – a fact in itself very telling of the lack of real closeness to his extended family under the veneer of polite letters of circumstance. Around mid-June 1690 the peripatetic Hofrat was finally back in Hanover.

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