Chapter 25

Summary

1502. The four psychological laws I have explained and distinguished from the ontological laws can be summarised as follows:
The rational subject acts according to two negative and two positive laws.

The negative laws are the first and third psychological laws. They say that 1. The object does not arouse any other activity in the subject than that by which the subject rests in the object through intuition; and 2. the object does not provide the subject with self-consciousness which begins only with the subject's second acts.

1503. The positive laws are the second and fourth psychological laws. These state: 1. granted that the rational principle has been moved to second acts through cosmological stimuli, it can concentrate and limit its attention on any of the elements of the object or of the objects (if there are many), or on one or other relationship between the objects, and thus become conscious also of intuiting the object; and 2. granted such movement, the rational principle can intuit its subjective modifications in the object, and form concepts. In this way it acquires subjective cognition or cognition by predication, and with this cognition acknowledges the object itself.