conventional Catholic theology in place so long as he could reorganize phi-
losophy along scientific lines. Spinoza took over the space vacated at Des-
cartes’s death; for Spinoza in Holland was still at the crossroads of the inter-
national scientific networks. But now it was a Holland becoming weary of
religious conflict and de-ideologized with the settling of the Spanish war. The
defeat of Protestant millennialism with the fall of the English Commonwealth
in 1660 must have given a heady moment to hopes like those of Spinoza for
a rational overcoming of religious differences. In this he was politically naive,
and his position, the most thorough of all rational theologies, became synony-
mous with the new brand of heresy as religious orthodoxies were reestablished
in power, above all in France.
Spinoza’s main accomplishment was inside the core of the intellectual
network. Spinoza was the last and most extreme of those who hoped to deduce
scientific laws axiomatically; at the very same time, Huygens and the empirical
scientists were giving up this criterion of certainty. Spinoza’s eminence in the
attention space came from his setting a new standard for ambition and bold-
ness in metaphysics. Untrammeled by religious orthodoxy, he was willing to
follow deterministic premises to their conclusions. Not only in his geometric
method of argument but also in the breadth and consistency of his unification
of ontology, epistemology, and ethics, Spinoza demonstrates in extreme form
what it is to have a philosophical system.
Leibniz’s Mathematical Metaphysics
Leibniz took a more cautious approach on religion, but he was equally ecu-
menical. Coming on the scene at the end of the religious wars which ravaged
Germany, he planned at first to reunify the Protestant and Catholic Churches
around a common theology. To this end, he developed a universal combinato-
rial logic and a calculating machine, which he hoped might be used by mis-
sionaries and which he dreamt would overcome religious disagreement (Brown,
1984: 56–57). Leibniz was an ambitious seizer of opportunities, and he worked
the international networks more energetically than anyone else. Born into two
families of professors at Leipzig, the best of the medieval Germany universities,
he tried the Rosicrucians, made the rounds of service to various German
princes, and got himself a diplomatic posting to Paris and London in the 1670s.
Coming from Germany helped him break through the loyalties now becoming
set among the second-generation Cartesians; and the German universities still
retained the traditional scholasticism which provides a key ingredient for new
combinations. Leibniz’s religious plans and his calculating machine were not
well received, but he soon found other grounds of activity. He met all the
important circles of scientists and philosophers, picked up on the latest ideas,
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