Nicolas Malebranche

“ A certain tender beauty as of twilight is spread over the world as we view it through the eyes of this cloistered philosopher, and we do not at first see that the softness and ideality of the picture is due to the gathering darkness. Abstraction seems only to be purifying, and not destroying, till it has done its perfect work. Malebranche conceived himself to be presenting to the world only the purest and most refined expression of Christian ethics and theology. ”

“ See on Malebranche, 2d Series, lecture 2, and 3d Series, vol. iii., Modern Philosophy, as well as the Fragments of Cartesian Philosophy; preface of the 1st edition of our Pascal:—"On this basis, so pure, Malebranche is not steady; is excessive and rash, I know; narrow and extreme, I do not fear to say; but always sublime, expressing only one side of Plato, but expressing it in a wholly Christian spirit and in angelic language. Malebranche is a Descartes who strays, having found divine wings, and lost all connection with the earth." ”

“ It was of this that Malebranche was thinking when he said that, if God held in one hand truth and in the other the pursuit of truth, he would say: "Lord, the truth is for thee alone; give me the pursuit." The joy of life is to put out one's power in some natural and useful or harmless way. There is no other. ”

“ But we have seen, and shall see, how treacherous the word Imagination is, and how people will misunderstand it, however frankly they are dealt with. Malebranche, as he always is, is quite frank and quite clear; he tells us definitely that imagination for him is “a little more and a little less than sense,” that it only consists in the power possessed by the soul of forming images of objects for itself. His quarrel with the “persons of study” is that they will read, write, and argue about the ancients, instead of recurring to primary truths ”

“ Malebranche is just one step from the pantheistic conclusion that the consciousness of finite individuality as such is illusory, and that as all bodies are but modes of one infinite extension, so all souls are but modes of one infinite thought. But while he willingly accepts this result in regard to matter, his religious feelings prevent him from accepting it in relation to mind. ”

“ Malebranche's doctrine of what he calls divine Providence was closely connected with his philosophical optimism. It enabled him to maintain the perfection of the universe. Admitting the obvious truth that the world exhibits many imperfections, and allowing that the Creator could have produced a better result if he had employed other means, Malebranche argued that, in judging the world, we must take into account not only the result but the methods by which it has been produced. It is the best world, he asserts, that could be framed by general and simple methods ”

“ Though Malebranche's conception was only a metaphysical theory, metaphysical theories have usually their pragmatic aspects; and the theory that the universe is as perfect as it could be marks a stage in the growth of intellectual optimism which we can trace from the sixteenth century. ”

“ Malebranche never loses sight of the great principle of the soul’s immateriality, even in his long and rather hypothetical disquisitions on the instrumentality of the brain in acts of thought; and his language is far less objectionable on this subject than that of succeeding philosophers. He is always consistent and clear in distinguishing the soul itself from its modifications and properties. He knew well and had deeply considered the application of mathematical and physical science to the philosophy of the human mind. ”

“ It is nothing strange that tenets which in themselves are ever so different, should nevertheless be confounded with each other, by those who do not consider them attentively. I shall not therefore be surprised if some men imagine that I run into the enthusiasm of Malebranche ”

“ It is obvious, that, in this conclusion, he went farther than his premises warranted; for, although no necessary connections among physical events can be traced by our faculties, it does not therefore follow that such connections are impossible. The only sound inference was, that the laws of nature are to be discovered, not, as the ancients supposed, by a priori reasonings from causes to effects, but by experience and observation. It is but justice to Malebranche to own, that he was one of the first who placed in a just and strong light this fundamental principle of the inductive logic. ”

“ In transcribing these words, it is amusing to observe, that Malebranche has slily suppressed the name of the author from whom they are borrowed; manifestly from an unwillingness to weaken their effect, by the suspicious authority of a philosopher not in communion with the Church of Rome. Recherche de la Vérité, Liv. ii, chap. ix.
Dr Reid, proceeding on the supposition that Malebranche was a Jesuit, has ascribed to the antipathy between this order and the Jansenists, the warmth displayed on both sides, in his disputes with Arnauld {Essays on the Int. Powers, p. 124 ”

“ The general result of the ethics of Malebranche is ascetic. The passions, like the senses, have no relation to the higher life of the soul; their value is only in relation to the union of soul and body, a union which is purely accidental or due to the arbitrary will of God. The more silently they discharge their provisional function, and the less they disturb or interfere with the pure activity of spirit, the more nearly they approach to the only perfection that is possible for them. ”

“ Whence it follows that a complete being is no sooner endowed with existence than with activity, and is no sooner a being than an individual nature. And therefore a complete being and a concrete nature are really one and the same thing. Malebranche's theory, denying that creatures have any true causality, is therefore utterly untenable, as it cannot be reconciled with the first principles of metaphysics.
4. The entity of the active power contained in the nature of any being cannot be anything else than its essential act; that is, the very act produced by God in its creation. ”

“ We grant in theory their right to do this; but nature resists. The new words, having no ideas previously associated with them, fall out of the [Pg 721] reader’s mind, except in mathematics, where they can be rendered evident by diagrams. In all this part, Malebranche expatiates on the excessive deference shown to authority, which, because it is great in religion, we suppose equally conclusive in philosophy, and on the waste of time which mere reading of many books entails ”

“ To the coarse and anthropomorphic conception of particular providence Malebranche may be right in objecting, but on the other hand, it cannot be doubted that any theory in which the universal is absolutely opposed to the particular, the infinite to the finite, is unchristian as well as unphilosophical. ”

“ The scepticism of Malebranche is merely ancillary to his mysticism. His philosophy, if we may use so quaint a description of it, is subjectivity leading objectivity in chains. He seems to triumph in his restoration of the inner man to his pristine greatness, by subduing those false traitors and rebels, the nerves and brain, to whom, since the great lapse of Adam, his posterity had been in thrall. It has been justly remarked by Brown, that in the writings of Malebranche, as in all theological metaphysicians of the catholic church, we perceive the commanding influence of Augustin. ”

“ These hypotheses of elder philosophers, some of which are not quite intelligibly distinct from each other, Malebranche having successively refuted, comes to what he considers the only possible alternative—namely, that the soul is united to an all-perfect Being, in whom all that belongs to his creatures is contained. Besides the exclusion of every other supposition which, by his sorites he conceives himself to have given, he subjoins several direct arguments in favour of his own theory, but in general so obscure and full of arbitrary assumption that they cannot be stated in this brief sketch. ”

“ It would have been impossible for a man endowed with such intrepidity and acuteness as Malebranche to overlook the question, so naturally raised by this sceptical theory, as to the objective existence of an external world. There is no necessary connection, he observes, between the presence of an idea in the soul, and the existence of the thing which it represents, as dreams and delirium prove. Yet we may be confident that extension, figure, and movement, do generally exist without us when we perceive them. ”

“ The power of volition, and, by parity of reasoning we may add, of thinking, is inseparable from the soul, but not the acts of volition or thinking themselves; as a body is always movable though it be not always in motion.
54. In this book it does not seem that Malebranche has been very successful in distinguishing the ideas of pure intellect from those which the senses or imagination present to us; nor do we clearly see what he means by the former, except those [Pg 722] of existence and a few more. But he now hastens to his peculiar hypothesis as to the mode of perception. ”

“ Malebranche has observed, that "It is not indeed thought to be charitable to disturb common opinions, because it is not truth which unites society as it exists so much as opinion and custom:" a principle which the world would not, I think, disagree with ”

“ Ideas are living things, and often remould the minds that admit them in spite of the greatest resistance of dead custom and traditionary belief. In the grasp of a logic that overpowers him the more easily in that he is unconscious of its tendency. Malebranche is brought within one step of the pantheistic conclusion, and all his Christian feeling and priestly training can do is just to save him from denial of the personality of man. ”

“ The moral observations of Malebranche are worth more than these hypotheses with which they are mingled. Men of powerful imagination express themselves with force and vivacity, though not always in the most natural manner, and often with great animation of gesture ”

“ Neither, on the other hand, must we, with Malebranche, make the reason of man to such a degree impersonal that it takes the place of truth which is its object, and of God who is its principle. It is truth that to us is absolutely impersonal, and not reason. Reason is in man, yet it comes from God. Hence it is individual and finite, whilst its root is in the infinite; it is personal by its{101} relation to the person in which it resides, and must also possess I know not what character of universality, of necessity even, in order to be capable of conceiving universal and necessary truths ”

“ In this theory of Malebranche, there is undoubtedly, as Bayle has remarked, [73] an approach to some speculations of the latter Platonists; but there is a much closer coincidence between it and the system of those Hindoo philosophers, who (according to Sir William Jones) “believed that the whole creation was rather an energy than a work; by which the infinite Mind, who is present at all times, and in all places, exhibits to his creatures a set of perceptions, like a wonderful picture, or piece of music, always varied, yet always uniform.” ”

“ He kept his act upon Malebranche's doctrine, 'Omnia videmus in Deo.' On 17 April 1713 he was suspended from his degrees for a 'tripos speech' in which he gave offence by asking certain questions, e.g. 'whether the sun shines when it is in eclipse,' where the sun clearly meant the Pretender (ib. vol. i. pt. ii. pp. 20, 21; Wordsworth, University Life, p. 231; Hearne, Diary) . On 7 July 1713 he preached a sermon at Haslingfield, near Cambridge, in support of the peace of Utrecht, with a loyal and ultra-tory apostrophe to Queen Anne. ”

“ Hobbes must have the fate of Sextus Roscius. What logic was there in this, unless to a man who was always dreaming of murder? Here was Leviathan, no longer afraid of the daggers of English cavaliers or French clergy, but "frightened from his propriety" by a row in an ale-house between some honest clod-hoppers of Derbyshire, whom his own gaunt scare-crow of a person that belonged to quite another century, would have frightened out of their wits.
Malebranche, it will give you pleasure to hear, was murdered. The man who murdered him is well known: it was Bishop Berkeley. ”

“ Among the opinions which chiefly characterize the system of Malebranche, the leading one is, that the causes which it is the aim of philosophy to investigate are only occasional causes; and that the Deity is himself the efficient and the immediate cause of every effect in the universe. ”

“ English mysticism is a fact, though unrecorded in the pages of the history of her philosophers; and English mysticism was never stronger than in the generation preceding Berkeley. The Cambridge Platonists had but lately passed away. Four or five translations of Jacob Böhmen had showed the popular studies, Norris of Bemerton was so well known that 258 his philosophy could be ridiculed in an elaborate parody, and Tom Brown, 'of facetious memory,' could tickle a not too fastidious public with a caricature of his Platonic love. The influence of Malebranche was felt upon English philosophy. ”

“ I am ashamed of my frame, and can hardly forbear expostulating with my destiny. I see myself, and the whole frame of Nature, shrink into fleeting ideas, which, like Epicurus’s atoms, dance about in emptiness. Descartes no sooner began to dig in this mine than scepticism was ready to break in upon him. He did what he could to keep it out. Malebranche and Locke, who dug deeper, found the difficulty of keeping out the enemy still to increase; but they laboured honestly in the design. Then Berkeley, who carried on the work, despairing of securing all, bethought himself of an expedient. ”