[797] Philosophy of the Human Mind, Lecture xxx. Brown’s own position, that “the idea is the mind,” seems to me as paradoxical, in expression at least, as anything in Malebranche.
56. “Let us repose,” he concludes, “in this tenet, that God is the intelligible world, or the place of spirits, like as the material world is the place of bodies; that it is from his power they receive all their modifications; that it is in his wisdom they find all their ideas; and that it is by his love they feel all their well-regulated emotions. And since his power and his wisdom and his love are but himself, let us believe with St. Paul, that he is not far from each of us, and that in him we live and move, and have our being.” But sometimes Malebranche does not content himself with these fine effusions of piety. His theism, as has often been the case with mystical writers, expands till it becomes as it were dark with excessive light, and almost vanishes in his own effulgence. He has passages that approach very closely to the pantheism of Jordano Bruno and Spinosa; one especially, wherein he vindicates the Cartesian argument for a being of necessary existence in a strain which perhaps renders that argument less incomprehensible, but certainly cannot be said, in any legitimate sense, to establish the existence of a Deity.[798]
[798] L. iii. c. 8.
57. It is from the effect which the invention of so original and striking an hypothesis, and one that raises such magnificent conceptions of the union between the Deity and the human soul, would produce on a man of an elevated and contemplative genius, that we must account for Malebranche’s forgetfulness of much that he has judiciously said in part of his treatise, on the limitation of our faculties and the imperfect knowledge we can attain as to our intellectual nature. For, if we should admit that ideas are substances, and not accidents of the thinking spirit, it would still be doubtful whether he has wholly enumerated, or conclusively refuted, the possible hypotheses as to their existence in the mind. And his more direct reasonings labour under the same difficulty from the manifest incapacity of our understandings to do more than form conjectures and dim notions of what we can so imperfectly bring before them.
58. The fourth and fifth books of the Recherche de la Vérité treat of the natural inclinations and passions, and of the errors which spring from those sources. These books are various and discursive, and very characteristic of the author’s mind; abounding with a mystical theology, which extends to an absolute negation of secondary causes, as well as with poignant satire on the follies of mankind. In every part of his treatise, but especially in these books, Malebranche pursues with unsparing ridicule two classes, the men of learning, and the men of the world. With Aristotle and the whole school of his disciples he has an inveterate quarrel, and omits no occasion of holding them forth to contempt. This seems to have been in a great measure warranted by their dogmatism, their bigotry, their pertinacious resistance to modern science, especially to the Cartesian philosophy, which Malebranche in general followed. “Let them,” he exclaims, “prove, if they can, that Aristotle, or any of themselves, has deduced one truth in physical philosophy from any principle peculiar to himself, and we will promise never to speak of him but in eulogy.”[799] But, until this gauntlet should be taken up, he thought himself at liberty to use very different language. “The works of the Stagyrite,” he observes, “are so obscure and full of indefinite words, that we have a colour for ascribing to him the most opposite opinions. In fact, we make him say what we please, because he says very little, though with much parade; just as children fancy bells to say anything, because they make a great noise, and in reality say nothing at all.”
[799] L. iv., c. 3.
59. But such philosophers are not the only class of the learned he depreciates. Those who pass their time in gazing through telescopes, and distribute provinces in the moon to their friends, those who pore over worthless books, such as the Rabbinical and other Oriental writers, or compose folio volumes on the animals mentioned in Scripture, while they can hardly tell what are found in their own province, those who accumulate quotations to inform us not of truth, but of what other men have taken for truth, are exposed to his sharp, but doubtless exaggerated and unreasonable ridicule. Malebranche, like many men of genius, was much too intolerant of what might give pleasure to other men, and too narrow in his measure of utility. He seems to think little valuable in human learning but metaphysics and algebra.[800] From the learned he passes to the great, and after enumerating the circumstances which obstruct their perception of truth, comes to the blunt conclusion that men “much raised above the rest by rank, dignity, or wealth, or whose minds are occupied in gaining these advantages, are remarkably subject to error, and hardly capable of discerning any truths which lie a little out of the common way.”[801]
[800] It is rather amusing to find that, while lamenting the want of a review of books, he predicts that we shall never see one, on account of the prejudice of mankind in favour of authors. The prophecy was falsified almost at the time. On regarde ordinairement les auteurs comme des hommes rares et extraordinaires et beaucoup élevés au-dessus des autres; on les révère donc au lieu de les mépriser et de les punir. Ainsi il n’y a guères d’apparence que les hommes érigent jamais un tribunal pour examiner et pour condamner tous les livres, qui ne font que corrompre la raison, c. 8.
La plupart des livres de certains savans ne sont fabriqués qu’à coups de dictionnaires, et ils n’ont guères lû que les tables des livres qu’ils citent, ou quelques lieux communs, ramassés de différens auteurs. On n’oseroit entrer d’avantage dans le détail de ces choses, ni en donner des exemples, de peur de choquer des personnes aussi fières et aussi bilieuses que sont ces faux savans; car on ne prend pas plaisir à se faire injurier en Grec et en Arabe.
[801] C. 9.