perhaps be well to add the observation, before finishing this
preface, that in denying the physical influence of the soul upon the [69]
body or of the body upon the soul, that is, an influence causing the one to
disturb the laws of the other, I by no means deny the union of the one with
the other which forms of them a suppositum; but this union is something
metaphysical, which changes nothing in the phenomena. This is what I have
already said in reply to the objection raised against me, in the _Memoires
de Trevoux_, by the Reverend Father de Tournemine, whose wit and learning
are of no ordinary mould. And for this reason one may say also in a
metaphysical sense that the soul acts upon the body and the body upon the
soul. Moreover, it is true that the soul is the Entelechy or the active
principle, whereas the corporeal alone or the mere material contains only
the passive. Consequently the principle of action is in the soul, as I have
explained more than once in the _Leipzig Journal_. More especially does
this appear in my answer to the late Herr Sturm, philosopher and
mathematician of Altorf, where I have even demonstrated that, if bodies
contained only the passive, their different conditions would be
indistinguishable. Also I take this opportunity to say that, having heard
of some objections made by the gifted author of the book on
_Self-knowledge_, in that same book, to my System of Pre-established
Harmony, I sent a reply to Paris, showing that he has attributed to me
opinions I am far from holding. On another matter recently I met with like
treatment at the hands of an anonymous Doctor of the Sorbonne. And these
misconceptions would have become plain to the reader at the outset if my
own words, which were being taken in evidence, had been quoted.

This tendency of men to make mistakes in presenting the opinions of others
leads me to observe also, that when I said somewhere that man helps himself
in conversion through the succour of grace, I mean only that he derives
advantage from it through the cessation of the resistance overcome, but
without any cooperation on his part: just as there is no co-operation in
ice when it is broken. For conversion is purely the work of God's grace,
wherein man co-operates only by resisting it; but human resistance is more
or less great according to the persons and the occasions. Circumstances
also contribute more or less to our attention and to the motions that arise
in the soul; and th