 Taurellus thus cannot be understood as an atheist, an atomist, or a proponent of a theory of a material God. Nevertheless, the opposition that Taurellus met during his lifetime was highly successful in raising suspicions in the minds of his contemporaries, and there are virtually no references to his thought in subsequent publications by Protestant metaphysicians (on Taurellus’s immediate successors, see Sparn 1976). However, his work was by no means forgotten. It is documented that Jacob Thomasius (1622–1684), one of Leibniz’s academic teachers, owned most of Taurellus’s books (Schmid 1860: 19). Leibniz himself gave to Taurellus the epithet of “the Scaliger of the Germans” (Feller 1718: 142)—no small compliment given the fact that the young Leibniz regarded Julius Caesar Scaliger as one of his models for an eclectic, conciliatory approach to philosophy (Leibniz 1923–: II, 1, p. 90).