Imagination, Memory, and the Thread of Meditation in Leibniz’s Universal Characteristic

Abstract

The paper argues that Leibniz’s project of a characteristica universalis presupposes a theory of mental faculties. Although Leibniz does not explicitly develop a faculty psychology in this context, imagination and memory emerge as necessary for interpreting and manipulating characters. I argue that imagination mediates between signs and ideas, while the universal characteristic seeks to stabilise this relation by externalising reasoning in a system of symbolic representation, thus transforming memory into a structured, visual repository of knowledge. By situating the project within a broader account of cognition, the paper shows that the characteristica does not merely represent thought but reorganises it. It thereby reveals an implicit model of cognition that is constitutive of the operations of the mind, reorganising mental faculties within its framework rather than remaining merely auxiliary to them.