responsibility for our delusions as well as for our crimes.
Malebranche.
Pascal, we are told, could not forgive Descartes for limiting God's action on the world to the "initial fillip" by which the process of evolution was started. Nevertheless, Pascal's friends, the Jansenists, were content to adopt Cartesianism as their religious philosophy, and his epigram certainly does not apply to the next distinguished Cartesian, Arnold Geulincx (1625-1669), a Fleming of Antwerp. Unfortunate in his life, this eminent teacher has of all original thinkers received the least credit for his services to metaphysics from posterity, being, outside a small circle of students, still utterly unknown to fame. Geulincx is the author of a theory called Occasionalism. Descartes had represented mind, which he identified with Thought, and matter, which he identified with Extension, as two antithetical substances with not a note in common. Nevertheless, he supposed that communications between them took place through a part of the brain called the pineal body. Geulincx cut through even this narrow isthmus, denying the possibility of any machinery for transmitting sensible images from the material world to our consciousness, or volitions from the mind to the limbs. How, then, were the facts to be explained? According to him, by the intervention of God. When the so-called organs of sense are acted on by vibrations from the external world, or when a particular movement is willed by the mind, the corresponding mental and material modifications are miraculously produced by the exercise of his omnipotence; and it is because these events occur on occasion of signals of which they
are not the effects but the consequents that the theory has received the name of Occasionalism.
The theory, as Geulincx formulated it, seems at first sight simply grotesque; and from a religious point of view it has the additional drawback of making God the immediate executor of every crime committed by man. Nevertheless, it is merely the logical application of a principle subsequently admitted by profound thinkers of the most opposing schools—namely, that consciousness cannot produce or transmit energy, combined with the belief in a God who does not exist for nothing. Even past the middle of the nineteenth century many English and French naturalists were persuaded that animal species to the number of 300,000 represented as many distinct creative acts; and at least one astronomer, who was also a philosopher, declared that the ultimate atoms of matter, running up to an immeasurably higher figure, "bore the stamp of the manufactured article."
The capture of Cartesianism by theology was completed by Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715). This accomplished writer and thinker, dedicated by physical infirmity to a contemplative life, entered the Oratory at an early age, and remained in it until his death. Coming across a copy of Descartes's Treatise on Man at twenty-six, he at once became a convert to the new philosophy, and devoted the next ten years to its exclusive study. At the end of that period he published his masterpiece, On the Investigation of Truth (De la Recherche de la Vérité, 1674), which at once won him an enormous reputation. It was followed by other works of less importance. The legend that Malebranche's end was hastened by an argument with Berkeley has been disproved.
Without acknowledging the obligation, Malebranche accepts the conclusions of Geulincx to the extent of denying the possibility of any communication between mind and matter. Indeed, he goes further, and denies that one portion of matter can act on another. But his real advance on Occasionalism lies in the question: How, then, can we know the laws of the material universe, or even that there is such a thing as matter at all? Once more God intervenes to solve the difficulty, but after a fashion much less crude than the miraculous apparatus of Geulincx. Introspection assures us that we are thinking things, and that our minds are stored with ideas, including the idea of God the all-perfect Being, and the idea of Extension with all the mathematical and physical truths logically deducible therefrom. We did not make this idea, therefore it comes from God, was in God's mind before it was in ours. Following Plotinus, Malebranche calls this idea intelligible Extension. It is the archetype of our material world. The same is true of all other clear and distinct ideas; they are, as Platonism teaches, of divine origin. But is it necessary to suppose that the ideal contents of each separate soul were placed in it at birth by the Creator? Surely the law of parsimony forbids. It is a simpler and easier explanation to suppose that the divine archetypal ideas alone exists, and that we apprehend them by a mystical communion with the divine consciousness; that, in short, we see all things in God. And in order to make this vision possible we must, as the Apostle says, live, move, and have our being in God. As a mathematician would say, God must be the locus, the place of souls.
There is unquestionably something grandiose about this theory, which, however, has the defect in orthodox
opinion of logically leading to the Pantheism, held in abhorrence by Malebranche, of his greater contemporary Spinoza. And it is a suggestive circumstance that the very similar philosophy of the Eternal Consciousness held by our countryman T. H. Green has been shown by the criticism of Henry Sidgwick to exclude the personality of God.