Rational Psychology

PREFACE

[b 2]

—[a] original: "a"; this completes the word "idea" from the previous page, likely forming the phrase "from which idea..." from which one thing all others can be gathered, however diverse the series of reasonings may be. From the finitude finitude: the state of being limited; in Wolff’s view, the soul is finite because it cannot perceive everything in the universe clearly at once of the soul, however, we deduce that not all perceptions perceptions: the mental acts by which the soul represents something to itself contained in that idea of the universe are immediate; and from there, we further teach why there are certain laws for these perceptions which the soul cannot violate.

These laws speak of a certain perpetual harmony original: "harmoniam" between the modifications modifications: the specific states or changes occurring in a substance, such as a thought in the mind or a movement in the body of the soul and certain motions existing in the body. Consequently, from those things which happen in the body, it may be gathered which ones ought to be present in the soul, even though we are not conscious of them; and conversely, from what is observed in the soul, it may be understood what must happen in the body, even though those things cannot strike the senses. This harmony of soul and body is not to be confused with the pre-established harmony original: "harmonia præſtabilita" of Leibniz Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716), a philosopher who proposed that the soul and body do not interact but are synchronized like two perfect clocks.; in this way, it claims a place for itself among the psychological heuristic principles heuristic principles: methodological rules or "shortcuts" used to discover new truths within a science.

In reality, therefore, we show that there is no kind of modification in the soul, by whatever name it may eventually be called, that cannot be explained in an intelligible way through the representative power representative power: the soul's core ability to mirror or model the state of the universe from its own perspective of the universe, such as we have established it to exist in the soul. This explanation—