But, if you do not positively know what an idea is, if you are ignorant whence ideas come, you at least know by what they come?
Yes; just in the same way as the ancient Egyptians, who, without knowing the source of the Nile, knew perfectly well that its waters reached them by its bed. We know perfectly that ideas come to us by the senses; but we never know whence they come. The source of this Nile will never be discovered.
If it is certain that all ideas are given by means of the senses, why does the Sorbonne, which has so long adopted this doctrine from Aristotle, condemn it with so much virulence in Helvetius?
Because the Sorbonne is composed of theologians.
SECTION II.
All in God.
In God we live and move and have our being.
—ST. PAUL, Acts xvii, 28.
Aratus, who is thus quoted and approved by St. Paul, made this confession of faith, we perceive among the Greeks.
The virtuous Cato says the same thing: "Jupiter est quodcumque vides quocumque moveris."—Lucan's "Pharsalia" ix, 580. "Whate'er we see, whate'er we feel, is Jove."
Malebranche is the commentator on Aratus, St. Paul, and Cato. He succeeded, in the first instance, in showing the errors of the senses and imagination; but when he attempted to develop the grand system, that all is in God, all his readers declared the commentary to be more obscure than the text. In short, having plunged into this abyss, his head became bewildered; he held conversations with the Word; he was made acquainted with what the Word had done in other planets; he became, in truth, absolutely mad; a circumstance well calculated to excite apprehension in our own minds, apt as we some of us are to attempt soaring, upon our weak and puny opinions, very far beyond our reach.