of God.  This system appeared to me to be such as would in no wise offend reason and faith; and I desired to submit it to the scrutiny of M. Bayle, as well as of those who are in controversy with him.  Now he has departed from us, and such a loss is no small one, a writer whose learning and acumen few have equalled.  But since the subject is under consideration and men of talent are still occupied with it, while the public also follows it attentively, I take this to be a fitting moment for the publication of certain of my ideas.

It will 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