104. As will hereafter be seen, Malebranche admitted that man sees every thing in God, even in this life; but his system, far from identifying the human me with the infinite being, carefully distinguishes them, not finding other means to sustain and enlighten the former than by approximating and uniting it to the second. To read the great metaphysician's immortal work is enough to convince one that his system was not that of this pure, primitive intuition, which is an act required of all empiricism, and which seems to rise within the limits of philosophy, from that intuition of the simple fact, the origin of all ideas and all facts, in which one of the dogmas of our religion, the beatific vision, seems realized upon earth in the domain of philosophy. These are senseless pretensions, and as far from the mind as from the system of Malebranche.[(9)]
[CHAPTER X.]
PROBLEM OF REPRESENTATION: MONADS OF LEIBNITZ.
105. The pretension to find a real truth, the fountain of all others, is dangerous in the extreme, however indifferent it may at first sight appear. Pantheism, and the deification of the me, two systems which coincide at bottom, are a consequence not easy to be avoided if it be attempted to establish all human science upon one fact.
106. The real truth or fact, which would serve as the basis of all science, should be immediately perceived, otherwise it would lack the character of origin and basis of other truths; because the medium by which it should be perceived would itself have the better right to the title of first truth. If this intermediate fact were the cause of the other, evidently this latter would not be primitive; and if the priority were given to the order of knowledge instead of the order of being, we should still have the same difficulty as now to explain the transition from subject to object, or the legitimacy of the medium by which we perceive the primitive fact.
Since then, the immediate presence, the intimate union of the understanding with the thing known is necessary, it is clear that as the me has this immediate presence only for itself and its own acts, the fact sought for must be the me itself. That which is immediately present to us is the facts of consciousness; by them we place ourselves in communication with what is distinct from us. In case then that we must find a primitive fact, the origin of all others, this fact must be the me. If we deny this consequence, we must deny the possibility of finding any fact which may be the source of transcendental science. Here we see how the apparently most innocent philosophical pretensions lead to fatal results.
107. There is here certainly very little chance for evasion, but there is one so specious as to merit an examination.
The fact, which is the scientific origin of all others, is not necessarily their true origin. By distinguishing between the principle of being and the principle of knowledge, all difficulty seems to be avoided. It is absurd and contrary to common sense, that the me is the origin of all that exists; but not that it is the representative principle of all that is or can be known. Representation is not synonymous with causality. Ideas represent but do not cause the objects represented. Why, then, is it not possible to admit a fact representative of all that the human understanding can know? It is certain that the perception of this fact must be immediate, that is, it must be supposed intimately present to the understanding perceiving it; for which reason, it can be nothing else than the me: this, however, is not to deify the me, but only to concede to it a representative force, which may have been given to it by a superior being. It makes the me not an universal cause, but a mirror which reflects the internal and external worlds.