Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz's

Imagine a boy in seventeenth-century Leipzig, wandering alone through a university library that is much too large for him. The year is somewhere in the 1650s. Outside, Europe is still reeling from the Thirty Years’ War: cities scarred, farms burned, families scattered. Inside the library, shelves sag under Latin tomes of logic, law, theology, and natural philosophy. The boy’s father has died, but left behind access to these books, and the boy takes advantage of it. He is eleven, maybe twelve, and instead of playing in the streets he pulls volume after volume from the shelves, trying to piece together the structure of knowledge. His name is Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, and he will grow into one of those rare figures who seem to believe, with alarming seriousness, that the world is rationally intelligible from top to bottom.Selenius Media