Relation

The forms themselves are relational: each great kind communes with others, and none can be grasped in isolation.

Relation is a category of being: relatives are things 'said to be of' or 'toward' something else, though not all relations belong to the furniture of the world.

In God, the persons are subsistent relations: the Father is nothing other than the relation of paternity, and this relation is identical with the divine essence.

Relations are not features of the world but comparisons performed by the mind; to think is to compute, and to compute is to relate names to one another.

Relations form a distinct class of ideas, produced when the mind brings two things together and compares them, yet they depend on real foundations in the things compared.

Relations are ideal, not real: they supervene on the intrinsic properties of monads, and no genuine link runs between one substance and another.

All objects of human reason reduce to seven philosophical relations, and the most important of these, causation, turns out to rest on nothing more than custom and constant conjunction.

The categories of relation, substance and accident, cause and effect, community of interaction, are forms the understanding imposes on experience, making objective knowledge possible.

Relation is the truth of essence: everything is what it is only through its relation to its other, and essence itself is constituted by the movement of reflection.