Reflection
Reflection
(Lat. reflectio, from re + flectere, to bend) The knowledge which the mind has of itself and its operations. The term is used in this sense by Locke (cf. Essay, II, 1, 4) Spinoza (cf. On the Improvement of the Understanding 13) and Leibniz (cf. Monadology, and New Essays, Preface, 4) but has now largely been supplanted by the term introspection. See Intelligence, Introspection. — L.W.
In ScholasticismReflexion is a property of spiritual or immaterial substances only. It is, therefore, a capacity of the human intellect which not only operates, but knows of its operating and may turn back on itself to know itself and its performances (reditio completa). A particular kind of reflexion is, in Thomism the reflexio super phantasma, by which the intellect retraces its steps until it reaches the phantasm from which it originally derived the universal; this is, according to Aquinas, the way the intellect comes to know the particular which, because material, is otherwise inaccessible to an immaterial faculty. — R.A.