man's attempted but vain compensations for the wilful violation of eternal laws. Solemn and weighty thoughts these, which it were well for all of us to meditate upon, but which, I remember, it is neither my province nor privilege at this time to discuss.

From this one-sided development of the elements of humanity, too, have sprung other evils far more melancholy and deplorable than even those of the grossest materialism and the most rampant infidelity. The logical consequences of the Positive Philosophy have proved so repugnant to the native instincts of humanity, that some minds-even earnest and true ones-protesting against their validity, and searching eagerly for the grounds of their refutation, have been carried away by the force of their instinctive beliefs, and have rushed madly into the opposite extreme of sacrilege and superstition. The reaction from materialism drowns itself in mysticism, and has developed a spirit which, manifesting itself in the unhealthy forms of mesmerism, electro-biology, table-turning, spirit-rapping, and other inane, false, partial, and exaggerated developments of man, "makes familiar play of the holiest instincts of humanity, and barters our firm beliefs and our righteous reverence for the sickly aberration of perverse and prurient imaginations." This reaction has revived the blasphemous idolatries of human power, and evolved a spirit which, arrogating to itself the power of a God, "yet gropes for the very holy of holies in kennels running deep with the most senseless and God-abandoned abominations."*"Our natural superstitions are bad enough; but thus to make a systematic business of fatuity and profanity, and to imagine that we are touching the spiritual kingdom of God and controlling it, is inexpressibly revolting and terrible. The horror and disgrace of such proceedings as those of the mesmerist and spirit-rappist were never approached even in the darkest days of heathendom and idolatry. Oh, ye who make shattered nerves and depraved sensations the interpreters of truth, the keys which shall unlock the gates of heaven, and open up the secrets of futurity-ye who inaugurate disease as the prophet of all wisdom-who make sin, death, and the devil the lords paramount of creation;-have ye bethought yourselves of the downward course which you are running into the pit of the bestial and abhorred? Oh, ye miserable mystics, when will ye know that all God's truths and all man's blessings lie in the broad health, in the trodden ways and in the laughing sunshine of the universe; and that all intellect, all genius, all worth, is merely the power of seeing the loftiest wonders in the commonest things?"

Quoted through memory, with alterations, from Ferriar, the distinguished and eloquent author of "Knowing and Being."

(To be continued.)

608

ART. VIII.-PSYCHOLOGY OF MALEBRANCHE.*

BY PROFESSOR HOPPUS, LL.D.

FATHER MALEBRANCHE ranks among the profoundest thinkers which the school of Descartes has produced. With a somewhat daring imagination for a philosopher, and a tendency to mysti cism in his speculations; he was nevertheless an acute, analytic metaphysician, as well as a devout Christian moralist, jealously attempting to guard those of his doctrines which seemed to others most to lean towards fatalism from abuse. He was born at Paris, in 1638, his father being one of the royal secretaries. In consequence of his personal malformation, he had a domestic education, until he was of an age to enter the college De la Marche, with a view to holy orders; whence he passed to the far-famed Sorbonne for his theology. Having refused a canonry at NotreDame, he entered the Oratory, in 1660. He now devoted himself much to ecclesiastical history, and read the principal Greek writers on this subject. Richard Simon next drew him to the study of Hebrew; but he had not yet found the line of pursuit which was most deeply to engage his mind. His passion was destined to be for psychological inquiry and original thinking; and he despised the merely historical knowledge of languages, and of the opinions of other men, and was anxious to discover truth, if possible, for himself. It is remarkable, considering his imaginative powers and his enthusiastic temperament, that he never could read ten lines of poetry without disgust. In his studies, his habits were quite those of the recluse; and he meditated with darkened windows, that he might more readily retire within himself; though his manners are said to have been simple and modest, cheerful and complaisant.

Being once in a bookseller's shop, a copy of Descartes' "Traité de l'Homme" was accidentally handed to him—an unfinished posthumous work by no means ranking with the most celebrated pieces of that great philosopher. It made an extraordinary impression, however, on the ardent mind of Malebranche. He found a new world instantly opening to his contemplation, a science of man which he had never before dreamed of. His admiration for Descartes, and the simple child-like docility of that great philosopher as an inquirer after truth, was unbounded. He was delighted with the freedom and independence of thought which characterized his book; nor was he less pleased with its author's avoidance of everything that could tend directly to clash with religious faith. As he proceeded with the perusal, his excitement was so great that it brought on violent palpitations of the

"Euvres de Malebranche." Paris, 1842.

heart, and he was obliged repeatedly to lay the book aside. Henceforth neither Greek nor Hebrew, nor ecclesiastical history, had any charms for him; and he devoted himself without reserve to the study of the new philosophy, which was so complete an innovation on the scholasticism that had hitherto reigned-one grand object of which had been to solve all questions, and get over all difficulties, by finding out methods of bringing them under the dogmas of Aristotle, or at least reconciling them with his opinions, so far as these could be made out. Malebranche at once became an ardent disciple of his master, regarding observation as the basis of philosophy, and rational evidence as the rule of its conclusions. He soon appropriated Descartes' entire doctrines, and zealously declared that if his works were by any chance lost, he would do his best to re-establish them. In theology, however, especially so far as regarded the doctrines of providence and grace, he was decidedly a disciple of St. Augustine. The first fruit of Malebranche's enthusiasm for the new method of philosophical study, was his Recherche de la Verité published in 1674; a book which had prodigious success, passing through many editions, and being translated into several languages. The author here points out, in an exact method, the sources of error in the search after truth to which we are liable, from our senses, imagination, inclinations, and passions; and he then treats of the remedies which ought to be applied. All the other publications of Malebranche may be regarded as little more than the development of this work; and his grand aim, throughout, is to show the agreement of the main principles of Descartes* with religion, and their bearings on the illustration of nature and grace. The acuteness, originality, and fertility of invention with which this book abounds, procured for it the highest eulogy. His mystical theory of our vision of all things in God, however, subjected it to attacks on all sides; and some remonstrated strongly against the tendency of his doctrine respecting the Divine agency to absorb all subordinate and secondary causes, and along with them man's responsibility.

This first work of our author was greatly altered in the successive editions. He adhered, however, to the theory that the will is the source of error in man, not the cognitive faculties; for the will, he says, guides the formation of our conclusions from the objects presented to us. We know, for instance, that we feel warmth or see light; and here we are not deceived, but only when the will chooses to hold that the light or the warmth exists in the object without. But as sensation gives us pleasure or pain, which chiefly move the will, sensation becomes the main remote cause of error. Hence the false ethical systems which

* For our review of Descartes, see the Number for January, 1855.

make pleasure the highest good; whereas the only true and real good is God himself, whom we can know only by the pure reason or intellect. But how can man know anything of the relations subsisting between mind and matter in the universe around him, since these two natures are so diverse from each other? He can only know them, each and both, in God, and by means of God's ever-acting agency. In this way, alone, is man freed from a life of hopeless and never-ending delusions. Man has ideas, indeed, as his consciousness tells him but his ideas do not guarantee to him the existence of the objects around him; for imagination also presents ideas, many of which are mere chimeras which never do or can exist. Some of our ideas are internal, or thoughts, strictly so called-modifications of the thinking soul only; other ideas relate to objects which we believe are external to us. These objects are material or spiritual. Material objects can only be perceived mediately, because they are extended, and are not homogeneous with the soul, and have no natural means of community with it: but external spiritual objects may be perceived mediately by ideas, though imperfectly, as well as immediately and clearly, in the Divine vision.

Malebranche wholly rejects the ancient Peripatetic idealism of films, effluxes, species, or phantasms (tenuia rerum simulacra) of the shape of bodies, and perpetually flowing off from them to our organs of sense-an inconceivable hypothesis; for what is the image and shape of a sound or odour? He equally opposes whatever glimpse may be found in the Grecian schools of a doctrine analogous to the egotistical idealism by which the name of Fichte is remarkable in later times, according to which the mind spins out from itself the whole web of its own ideas, and creates the entire universe of mind and matter for itself. Our author's argument for rejecting the principle of innate ideas would not be admitted by Descartes or Leibnitz, who supposed that the ideas they termed innate were limited in number. Malebranche argues against these ideas, on the ground that the "number of ideas which the mind may entertain is potentially infinite, and we cannot suppose, without absurdity, that an infinity of ideas has been originally furnished to our minds." Now, be the doctrine of innate ideas, in any sense of it, right or wrong, no one but Malebranche ever imagined that in order to exist at all, they must be infinite in number. As to the commonly-received notion, that in order to have available perceptions of the objects of sense and thought, the soul only requires its present faculties, and their just development and use this our author regards as a profane theory, which does nothing less than make man "equal to God," who alone is able to take cognisance of the objects of knowledge, by means of his own proper resources and

energies. As the Divine Being, therefore, necessarily has in His infinite mind the ideas of all things, He alone is man's "intelligible world:" all His works must be seen and known in Himself. The result is, that not matter only, but even created mind, has only, in and for itself, a sort of passive activity: all its operations and agencies are only secondary; it cannot possibly, from its very nature, have any independent power or spontaneity conferred on it it can truly originate nothing.

:

In order to render his views, which some thought obscure, and others (what was still worse for an ecclesiastic) heterodox, more adapted to the popular mind, and to obviate the idea that any of them were not in accordance with the doctrines of the Church, he published his Conversations Chrétiennes in 1677, at the instance of the Duc de Chevreuse. In 1680 appeared the Traité de la Nature et la Grace, occasioned by a controversy with Arnauld on the subject, in which Bossuet also took part against Malebranche, but which ended, like many other such disputes, without result. In the same year he published his Méditations Chrétiennes et Métaphysiques, a dialogue between the Word (Aóyos) and the author, with a view to throw further light on the above Treatise; for he held that the "eternal Word is the universal reason of spirits :" "Comme je suis convaincu que le Verbe éternel est la Raison universelle des esprits, je crois devoir le faire parler comme le véritable Maître."* In the year 1682 the Traité de Morale followed, in which Malebranche endeavours to derive all human duty from his own philosophical principles as perfectly coinciding with Christianity, and to prove, in his own way, the union of all spirits with the Divinity. The Entretiens sur la Métaphysique et sur la Religion were published in 1687, and some have pronounced this work to be the author's chef-d'œuvre. Its tone is, as usual with Malebranche, elevated, solemn, and devout; and it is written in a finished and attractive style of dialogue,which Plato might have envied : our author himself, however, preferred the " Méditations." Both works are in his best manner; but the "Entretiens" may be regarded as furnishing a clear, animated compend of his entire philosophy. Being accused by Régis of abetting the ethical system of Epicurus, and by Father Lamy, on the other hand, of advocating an exclusively disinterested love of God, he published his brief tract entitled Traité de l'Amour de Dieu, in 1697, in which he maintains a medium between extremes; and his book conciliated Bossuet, and was praised at Rome. From some of his works having found their way to China, probably in the hands of Catholic missionaries, he composed his short dialogue, Entretien d'un Philosophe Chrétien, et d'un Philosophe Chinois,

"Médit. Chrét.," Avertissement.