counselors in relation to the
interests of life!"--Sensation and imagination belong to the soul in virtue
of its union with the body; apart from this it is pure spirit. The essence
of the soul is thought, for this function is the only one which cannot be
abstracted from it without destroying it. Hence there can be no moment in
the life of the soul when it ceases to think; it thinks always (_l'ame
pense toujours_), only it does not always remember the fact.

The kinds of knowledge differ with the classes of things cognized. God is
known immediately and intuitively. He is necessary and unlimited being,
the universal, infinite being, being absolutely; he only is known through
himself. The concept of the infinite is the presupposition of the concept
of the finite, and the former is earlier in us; we gain the conception of
a particular thing only when we omit something from the idea of "being in
general," or limit it. God is cogitative, like spirits, and extended, like
bodies, but in an entirely different manner from created things. We know
our own soul through consciousness or inner perception. We know its
existence more certainly than that of bodies, but understand its nature
less perfectly than theirs. To know that it is capable of sensations of
pain, of heat, of light, we must have experienced them. For knowledge
of the minds of others we are dependent upon conjecture, on analogical
inferences from ourselves.

But how is the unextended soul capable of cognizing extended body? Only
through the medium of _ideas_. The ideas occupy an intermediate position
between objects, whose archetypes they are, and representations in the
soul, whose causes they are. The ideas, after the pattern of which God
has created things, and the relations among them (necessary truths), are
eternal, hence uncaused; they constitute the wisdom of God and are not
dependent on his will. Things are in God in archetypal form, and are
cognized through these their archetypes in God. Ideas are not produced by
bodies, by the emission of sensuous images,[1] nor are they originated by
the soul, or possessed by it as an innate possession. But God is the cause
of knowledge, although he neither imparts ideas to the soul in creation nor
produces them in it on every separate occasion. The ideas or perfections of
things are in God and are beheld by spirits, who likewise dwell in God as
the universal reason. As space is the place of bodies, so God is the
place of spi