60. The sixth and last book announces a method of directing our pursuit of truth, by which we may avoid the many errors to which our understandings are liable. It promises to give them all the perfection of which our nature is capable, by prescribing the rules we should invariably observe. But it must, I think, be confessed that there is less originality in this method than we might expect. We find, however, many acute and useful, if not always novel, observations on the conduct of the understanding, and it may be reckoned among the books which would supply materials for what is still wanting to philosophical literature, an ample and useful logic. We are so frequently inattentive, he observes, especially to the pure ideas of the understanding, that all resources should be employed to fix our thoughts. And for this purpose we may make use of the passions, the senses, or the imagination, but the second with less danger than the first, and the third than the second. Geometrical figures he ranges under the aids supplied to the imagination rather than to the senses. He dwells much at length on the utility of geometry in fixing our attention, and of algebra in compressing and arranging our thoughts. All sciences, he well remarks, and I do not know that it had been said before, which treat of things distinguishable by more or less in quantity, and which consequently may be represented by extension, are capable of illustration by diagrams. But these, he conceives, are inapplicable to moral truths, though sure consequences may be derived from them. Algebra, however, is far more useful in improving the understanding than geometry, and is in fact, with its sister arithmetic, the best means that we possess.[802] But as men like better to exercise the imagination than the pure intellect, geometry is the more favourite study of the two.
[802] L. vi., c. 4. All conceptions of abstract ideas, he justly remarks in another place, are accompanied with some imagination, though we are often not aware of it; because these ideas have no natural images or traces associated with them, but such only as the will of man or chance has given. Thus, in analysis, however general the ideas, we use letters and signs, always associated with the ideas of the things, though they are not really related, and for this reason do not give us false and confused notions. Hence, he thinks, the ideas of things which can only be perceived by the understanding, may become associated with the traces on the brain, l. v., c. 2. This is evidently as applicable to language as it is to algebra.
Cudworth has a somewhat similar remark in his Immutable Morality, that the cogitations we have of corporeal things are usually, in his technical style, both noematical and phantasmatical together, the one being as it were the soul, and the other the body of them. “Whenever we think of a phantasmatical universal or universalised phantasm, or a thing which we have no clear intellection of (as for example of the nature of a rose in general), there is a complication of something noematical and something phantasmatical together; for phantasms themselves as well as sensations are always individual things.” P. 143.
Character of Malebranche. 61. Malebranche may perhaps be thought to have occupied too much of our attention at the expense of more popular writers. But for this very reason, that the Recherche de la Vérité is not at present much read, I have dwelt long on a treatise of so great celebrity in its own age, and which, even more perhaps than the metaphysical writings of Descartes, has influenced that department of philosophy. 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. He is very copious and diligent in illustration, and very clear in definition. His principal errors, and the sources of them in his peculiar temperament, have appeared in the course of these pages. And to these we may add his maintaining some Cartesian paradoxes, such as the system of vortices, and the want of sensation in brutes. The latter he deduced from the immateriality of a thinking principle, supposing it incredible, though he owns it had been the tenet of Augustin, that there could be an immaterial spirit in the lower animals, and also from the incompatibility of any unmerited suffering with the justice of God.[803] Nor was Malebranche exempt from some prejudices of scholastic theology; and though he generally took care to avoid its technical language, is content to repel the objection to his denial of all secondary causation from its making God the sole author of sin, by saying that sin being a privation of righteousness, is negative, and consequently requires no cause.
[803] This he had borrowed from a maxim of Augustin: sub justo Deo quisquam nisi mereatur, miser esse non potest; whence, it seems that father had inferred the imputation of original sin to infants; a happy mode of escaping the difficulty.
Compared with Pascal. 62. Malebranche bears a striking resemblance to his great contemporary Pascal, though they were not, I believe, in any personal relation to each other, nor could either have availed himself of the other’s writings. Both of ardent minds, endowed with strong imagination and lively wit, sarcastic, severe, fearless, disdainful of popular opinion and accredited reputations; both imbued with the notion of a vast difference between the original and actual state of man, and thus solving many phenomena of his being; both, in different modes and degrees, sceptical, and rigorous in the exaction of proof; both undervaluing all human knowledge beyond the regions of mathematics; both of rigid strictness in morals, and a fervid enthusiastic piety. But in Malebranche there is a less overpowering sense of religion; his eye roams unblenched in the light, before which that of Pascal had been veiled in awe; he is sustained by a less timid desire of truth, by greater confidence in the inspirations that are breathed into his mind; he is more quick in adopting a novel opinion, but less apt to embrace a sophism in defence of an old one; he has less energy, but more copiousness and variety.
Arnauld on true and false ideas. 63. Arnauld, who, though at first in personal friendship with Malebranche, held no friendship in a balance with his rigid love of truth, combated the chief points of the other’s theory in a treatise on true and false ideas. This work I have never had the good fortune to see; it appears to assail a leading principle of Malebranche, the separate existence of ideas, as objects in the mind independent and distinguishable from the sensation itself. Arnauld maintained, as Reid and others have since done, that we do not perceive or feel ideas, but real objects, and thus led the way to a school which has been called that of Scotland, and has had a great popularity among our later metaphysicians. It would require a critical examination of his work, which I have not been able to make, to determine precisely what were the opinions of this philosopher.[804]
[804] Brucker. Buhle. Reid’s Intellectual Powers.
64. The peculiar hypothesis of Malebranche, that we see all things in God, was examined by Locke in a short piece, contained in the collection of his works. It will readily be conceived that two philosophers, one eminently mystical and endeavouring upon this highly transcendental theme to grasp in his mind and express in his language something beyond the faculties of man, the other as characteristically averse to mystery, and slow to admit any thing without proof, would have hardly any common ground even to fight upon. Locke, therefore, does little else than complain that he cannot understand what Malebranche has advanced; and most of his readers will probably find themselves in the same position.
Norris. 65. He had, however, an English supporter of some celebrity in his own age, Norris; a disciple, and one of the latest we have had, of the Platonic school of Henry More. The principal metaphysical treatise of Norris, his Essay on the Ideal World, was published in two parts, 1701 and 1702. It does not therefore come within our limits. Norris is more thoroughly Platonic than Malebranche, to whom, however, he pays great deference, and adopts his fundamental hypothesis on seeing all things in God. He is a writer of fine genius, and a noble elevation of moral sentiments, such as predisposes men for the Platonic schemes of theosophy. He looked up to Augustin with as much veneration as to Plato, and respected more, perhaps, than Malebranche, certainly more than the generality of English writers, the theological metaphysicians of the schools. With these he mingled some visions of a later mysticism. But his reasonings will seldom bear a close scrutiny.