But the teaching of Leibniz--even more perhaps than that of Spinoza--fell on an evil age: if it was not actually choked with thorns, it found a soil with little depth, and its brief verdure was soon followed by a fearful withering. Anxious as Leibniz was to commend his theories to all men,--and not least perhaps to win the suffrages of some illustrious and intelligent women--he was led to present them under forms and phrases which were to each correspondent specially familiar. And the natural consequence was not absent. The forms of accommodation were what told: they stuck, and the truth they were meant to convey slipped away: the Leibnitian theory was re-interpreted into the doctrines it had been meant to supersede. As with Spinoza, so with Leibniz, a keen apprehension of his meaning came first to the thinkers on the borderland of literature and philosophy, to Lessing and Herder, and found an appreciative welcome in the more academic systems first from Schelling and Hegel. Above all, this theory of 'petites perceptions' so closely bound up (as was to be expected) with his mathematical discoveries in the Calculus, is what marks him as having a finer ear for the secret harmonies and principles of existence than the coarser organs of popular philosophy could catch up or appreciate.
'In order,' says Leibniz, 'to get a clearer idea of the little perceptions which we cannot distinguish in the crowd, I am accustomed to employ the example of the roar or noise of the sea which strikes us upon the shore. To hear this sound, as we do hear it, we must hear the parts which compose this total, i. e. the sounds of each wave, though each of these little sounds only makes itself perceptible in the confused assemblage of all the others together, (that is to say, in that same roar,) and would not be noticed if this wave which causes it were alone. For we must be a little affected by the movement of that wave, and we must have some perception of each of these sounds, however small they may be; otherwise we should never have the perception of a hundred thousand waves, since a hundred thousand zeros would never make anything.... These little perceptions are of greater efficiency by their consequences than we suppose. It is they which form that _Je ne sais quoi_, those tastes, those images of sensible qualities, clear in the assemblage, but confused in the parts; those impressions made upon us by surrounding bodies which envelop the infinite, that _nexus_ which each being has with all the rest of the universe. It may even be said that in virtue of these little perceptions the present is big with the future and laden with the past, that everything conspires together: and that in the least of substances, eyes as piercing as those of God could read the whole sequel of the things of the universe.