Mental Capital — Transfers of Knowledge in Eighteenth-Century Europe

Abstract

FROM the time of the publication of his Memorandum on the Founding of a Learned Society in Germany in 1669 to his death in 1716, G. B. Leibnitz held fast to his view that the growth of a scientific enterprise in Europe depended on increased communion between savants in different nations and between savants and other social groups within nations. The study of the natural world should be a practical and wordly, as well as a theoretical and abstract pursuit. Leibnitz carried theory into practice with his calculus and his calculating machines, his mechanical pumps for use at the Harz mines, his plans for a universal language for scientific discussion, and in his demand that the provincial German scientific society, the Leopoldine Academy, become a focus of a united national effort in scientific, technical and commercial research. His cultural entrepreneurship led to the foundation of the Berlin Academy of Science, which began publishing its transactions in 1710. Although much more gifted than most, Leibnitz was but one of several projectors of a post-Newtonian scientific enterprise for all Europe.¹

Savants and students should participate as much as they can with other people and in the world.

G. W. Leibnitz, 1669