idea is the object of thought? Th. [I admit it, provided you add that it is an immediate internal object, and that this object is an expression of the nature or the qualities of things. If the idea were the form of thought, it would spring up and cease with the actual thought to which it corresponds ; but being the object it may exist previous to and after the thoughts. External sensible objects are only mediate because they cannot act immediately upon the soul. God alone is the external immediate object. We might say that the soul itself is its own immediate internal object; but it is this in so far as it contains ideas, or what corresponds to things. For the soul is a little world, in which distinct ideas are a representation of God, and in which confused ideas are a representation of the universe.] . Ph. We who suppose that at the beginning the soul is a tabula rasa, void of all characters and without an idea, ask how it comes to receive ideas, and by what means it acquires this prodigious quantity of them? To that question the reply in a word is: From experience. Th. [This tabula rasa, of which so much is said, is in my opinion only a fiction which nature does not admit, and which is based only upon the imperfect notions of philosophers, like the vacuum, atoms, and rest, absolute or relative, of two parts of a whole, or like the primary matter which is conceived as without form. Uniform things and those which contain no variety are never anything but abstractions, like time, space, and the other entities of pure mathematics. There is no body whatever whose parts are at rest, and there is no substance whatever that has nothing by which to distinguish it from every other. Human souls differ, not only from other souls, but also among themselves, although the difference is not at all of the kind called specific. And, according to the proofs which I believe we have, every substantial thing, be it soul or body, has its own characteristic relation to every other; and the one must always differ from the other by intrinsic con notations. Not to mention the fact that those who speak so frequently of this tabula rasa after having taken away the ideas cannot say what remains, like the scholastic philosophers, who leave nothing in their primary matter. You may perhaps reply that this tabula rasa of the philosophers means that the soul has by nature and originally only bare faculties. But faculties without some act, in a word the pure powers of the school