Rational Psychology

PREFACE

losophers it is not forbidden to test their strengths in advancing the boundaries of science. Indeed, we have observed the laws which first philosophy first philosophy: also known as metaphysics; the study of the fundamental principles of being, which provides the basic rules for all other sciences, the founder of the directing notions, prescribes. Therefore, we first inquired into the essence and nature essence and nature: in Wolff’s philosophy, essence is what makes a thing what it is, while nature is the internal principle that causes its actions of the soul; this was done both so that it might be established from what source we understand which things can happen to the soul, and so that it might appear how these things are brought into action. There is no one who does not know that the soul represents this universe to itself in accordance with the changes that occur in the sensory organs when sensible things act upon them. However, we have demonstrated—independently of any specific system for explaining the interaction original: "commercium"; the "commerce" or relationship between the immaterial soul and the material body that exists between the soul and the body—that there is within the soul a power of representing this universe to itself in the manner we have mentioned. We have also shown that in this power, according to its various aspects, consists no less the essence than the nature of the soul. Soon, having examined this power more deeply, we showed that the soul continually produces, in a certain unique way, an idea of the entire universe original: "ideam totius universi"; Wolff posits that the soul, as a mirror of the world, contains a representation of the whole universe from its own perspective regarding all the states of the world, so that infinite things are present in each partial idea, and therefore from