He then proceeds to his positive proof, asserting, in the first place, that it is “absolutely necessary that God should have in himself the ideas of all the beings which he has created, since otherwise he could not have produced them;”[128] and, in the second place, that God is united to our soul by his presence, “so that he may be said to have that relation of place to the mind, which space has to body.”[129] Wherever the human mind is, there God is, and consequently all the ideas which are in God. We have thus a fund of all the ideas necessary for perception, and a fund, which, in consequence of the ubiquity of the divine mind, is ever present, requiring, therefore, for our perception of them, only that divine will, without which no change can take place.
That perception takes place, by the presence of this one stock of ideas eternally present in the divine mind, with which every other mind is united,—rather than by the creation of an infinite number of ideas in each separate mind,—he conceives to be proved, by various reasons,—by the greater simplicity of this mode,—by its peculiar consistency with that state of dependence on the divine Being, as the source of all light, in which the mind of man is represented in many passages of Scripture,—by various notions, such as those of infinity, genera, species, &c. the universality of which he conceived to be inconsistent with the absolute unity and limitation of every idea, that does not derive a sort of infinity from the mind in which it exists,—and by some other reasons, very mystical and very feeble, in which, though it may not be difficult to discover what their author meant, it is certainly very difficult to conceive, how a mind so acute as his, could have been influenced by them.
It is, indeed, only this relation of the mind of Malebranche to his own very strange hypothesis, which there is any interest in tracing; for, though I have thought it my duty to give you a slight sketch of the hypothesis itself, as a part of the general history of our science, with which the reputation and genius of its author render it necessary for you to have some acquaintance, I am far from thinking, that it can throw any light on our speculations, in the present improved state of the Science of Mind. I shall not waste your time, therefore, with pointing out to you the innumerable objections to his hypothesis, which, after the view already given by me of the simple process of perception, are, I trust, so manifest, as not to require to be pointed out. It may be more interesting to consider, in the history of the Philosophy of Mind, what circumstances led to the formation of the hypothesis.
In the first place I may remark, that, notwithstanding his veneration for the greater number of the opinions of Des Cartes, Malebranche unfortunately had not adopted the very enlightened views of that eminent philosopher, with respect to the nature of ideas. He considered them as existing distinct from the sentient or percipient mind,—and, reasoning very justly from this error, inferred their presence in the mind of the Deity,—who formed the universe, not casually, but according to conceptions, that must have preceded creation,—the archetypes, or exemplars, of all that was to be created. This opinion, as to the eternal forms subsisting in the divine mind, agrees exactly with that of Plato, in one of the most celebrated of his doctrines, and certainly one of the most poetical,—which, though a term of praise that usually does not imply much excellence of philosophy, is the species of praise to which the philosophy of Plato has the justest claim. It has been delivered, in very powerful verse, by one of our own poets, who describes himself as, in science, a follower of the genius of ancient Greece, and who was worthy of the inspiring presence of that majestic guide:
“Ere the radiant sun
Sprang from the east, or 'mid the vault of night
The moon suspended her serener lamp;
Ere mountains, woods, or streams, adorn'd the globe,
Or Wisdom taught the sons of men her lore,—
Then lived the Almighty One, then, deep retired