Part 22

_The Philosophy of Malebranche._--Malebranche was prepared, by the ascetic training of the cloister and the teaching of Augustine, to bring to clear consciousness and expression many of the tendencies that were latent and undeveloped in the philosophy of Descartes. To use a chemical metaphor, the Christian Platonism of the church father was a medium in which Cartesianism could precipitate the product of its elements. Yet the medium was, as we shall see, not a perfect one, and hence the product was not quite pure. Without metaphor, Malebranche, by his previous habits of thought, was well fitted to detect and develop the pantheistic and ascetic elements of his master's philosophy. But he was not well fitted to penetrate through the veil of popular language under which the discordance of that philosophy with orthodox Christianity was hidden. On the contrary, the whole training of the Catholic priest, and especially his practical spirit, with that tendency to compromise which a practical spirit always brings with it, enabled him to conceal from himself as well as from others the logical result of his principles. And we do not wonder even when we find him treating as a "miserable" the philosopher who tore away the veil.

Malebranche saw "_all things in God._" In other words, he taught that knowledge is possible only in so far as thought is the expression, not of the nature of the individual subject as such, but of a universal life in which he and all other rational beings partake. "No one can feel my individual pain; every one can see the truth which I contemplate--why is it so? The reason is that my pain is a modification of my substance, but truth is the common good of all spirits."[16] This idea is ever present to Malebranche, and is repeated by him in an endless variety of forms of expression. Thus, like Descartes, but with more decision, he tells us that the idea of the infinite is prior to the idea of the finite. "We conceive of the infinite being by the very fact that we conceive of being without thinking whether it be finite or no. But in order that we may think of a finite being, we must necessarily cut off or deduct something from the general notion of being, which consequently we must previously possess. Thus the mind does not apprehend anything whatever, except in and through the idea that it has of the infinite; and so far is it from being the case that this idea is formed by the confused assemblage of all the ideas of particular things as the philosophers maintain, that, on the contrary, all these particular ideas are only

## participations in the general idea of the infinite, just as God does not

derive his being from the creatures, but all the creatures are imperfect

## participations of the divine Being."[17] Again, he tells us, in the same

chapter, that "when we wish to think of any particular thing, we first cast our view upon all being, and then apply it to the consideration of the object in question. We could not desire to see any particular object unless we saw it already in a confused and general way, and as there is nothing which we cannot desire to see, so all objects must be in a manner present to our spirit." Or, as he puts it in another place, "our mind would not be capable of representing to itself the general ideas of genera and species if it did not see all things as contained in one; for every creature being an individual we cannot say that we are apprehending any created thing when we think the general idea of a triangle."

Relation of the Divine mind to human knowledge.

The main idea that is expressed in all these different ways is simply this, that to determine any individual object as such, we must relate it to, and distinguish it from, the whole of which it is a part; and that, therefore, thought could never apprehend anything if it did not bring with itself the idea of the intelligible world as a unity. Descartes had already expressed this truth in his _Meditations_, but he had deprived it of its full significance by making a distinction between the being and the idea of God, the former of which, in his view, was only the cause of the latter. Malebranche detects this error, and denies that there is any idea of the infinite, which is a somewhat crude way of saying that there is no division between the idea of the infinite and its reality. What Reid asserted of the external world, that it is not represented by an idea in our minds, but is actually present to them, Malebranche asserted of God. No individual thing, he tells us--and an idea is but an individual thing--could represent the infinite. On the contrary, all individual things are represented through the infinite Being, who contains them all in his substance "tres efficace, et par consequence tres intelligible."[18] We know God by himself, material things only by their ideas in God, for they are "unintelligible in themselves, and we can see them only in the being who contains them in an intelligible manner." And thus, unless we in some way "saw God, we should be able to see nothing else." The vision _of_ God or _in_ God, therefore, is an "intellectual intuition" in which seer and seen, knower and known, are one. Our knowledge of things is our participation in God's knowledge of them.

When we have gone so far with Malebranche, we are tempted to ask why he does not follow out his thought to its natural conclusion. If the idea of God is not separable from his existence, if it is through the idea of him that all things are known, and through his existence that all things are, then it would seem necessarily to follow that our consciousness of God is but a part of God's consciousness of himself, that our consciousness of self and other things is but God's consciousness of them, and lastly, that there is no existence either of ourselves or other things except in this consciousness. To understand Malebranche is mainly to understand how he stopped short of results that seemed to lie so directly in the line of his thought.

To begin with the last point, it is easy to see that Malebranche only asserts unity of idea and reality in God, to deny it everywhere else, which with him is equivalent to asserting it in general and denying it in particular. To him, as to Descartes, the opposition between mind and matter is absolute. Material things cannot come into our minds nor can our minds go out of themselves "pour se promener dans les cieux."[19] Hence they are in themselves absolutely unknown; they are known only in God, in whom are their ideas, and as these ideas again are quite distinct from the reality, they "might be presented to the mind without anything existing." That they exist _out_ of God in another manner than the intelligible manner of their existence _in_ God, is explained by a mere act of His will, that is, it is not explained at all. Though we see all things in God, therefore, there is no connexion between his existence and theirs. The "world is not a necessary emanation of divinity; God is perfectly self-sufficient, and the idea of the infinitely perfect Being can be conceived quite apart from any other. The existence of the creatures is due to the free decrees of God."[20] Malebranche, therefore, still treats of external things as "things in themselves," which have an existence apart from thought, even the divine thought, though it is only in and through the divine thought they can be known by us. "To see the material world, or rather to judge that it exists (since in itself it is invisible), it is necessary that God should reveal it to us, for we cannot see the result of his arbitrary will through necessary reason."[21]

But if we know external things only through their idea in God, how do we know ourselves? Is it also through the idea of us in God? Here we come upon a point in which Malebranche diverges very far from his master. We do not, he says, properly _know_ ourselves at all as we know God or even external objects. We are conscious of ourselves by inner sense (_sentiment interieur_), and from this we know _that_ we are, but we do not know _what_ we are. "We know the existence of our soul more distinctly than of our body, but we have not so perfect a knowledge of our soul as of our body." This is shown by the fact that from our idea of body as extended substance, we can at once see what are its possible modifications. In other words, we only need the idea of extended substance to see that there is an inexhaustible number of figures and motions of which it is capable. The whole of geometry is but a development of what is given already in the conception of extension. But it is not so with our consciousness of self, which does not enable us to say prior to actual experience what sensations or passions are possible to us. We only know what heat, cold, light, colour, hunger, anger and desire are by feeling them. Our knowledge extends as far as our experience and no further. Nay, we have good reason to believe that many of these modifications exist in our soul only by reason of its accidental association with a body, and that if it were freed from that body it would be capable of far other and higher experiences. "We know by feeling that our soul is great, but perhaps we know almost nothing of what it is in itself." The informations of sense have, as Descartes taught, only a practical but no theoretical value; they tell us nothing of the external world, the real nature of which We know not through touch and taste and sight, but only through our idea of extended substances; while of the nature of the soul they do not tell us much more than that it exists and that it is not material. And in this latter case we have no idea, nothing better than sense to raise us above its illusions. It is clear from these statements that by self-consciousness Malebranche means consciousness of desires and feelings, which belong to the individual as such, and not consciousness of self as thinking. He begins, in fact, where Descartes ended, and identifies the consciousness of self as thinking, and so transcending the limits of its own particular being, with the consciousness or idea of God. And between the consciousness of the finite in sense and the consciousness of the infinite in thought, or in other words, between the consciousness of the universal and the consciousness of the individual, he sees no connexion. Malebranche is just one step from the pantheistic conclusion that the consciousness of finite individuality as such is illusory, and that as all bodies are but modes of one infinite extension, so all souls are but modes of one infinite thought. But while he willingly accepts this result in regard to matter, his religious feelings prevent him from accepting it in relation to mind. He is driven, therefore, to the inconsistency of holding that sense and feeling, through which in his view we apprehend the finite as such, give us true though imperfect knowledge of the soul, while the knowledge they give us of body is not only imperfect but false.[22] Thus the finite spirit is still allowed to be a substance, distinct from the infinite, though it holds its substantial existence on a precarious tenure. It is left hanging, we may say, on the verge of the infinite, whose attraction must soon prove too strong for it. Ideas are living things, and often remould the minds that admit them in spite of the greatest resistance of dead custom and traditionary belief. In the grasp of a logic that overpowers him the more easily in that he is unconscious of its tendency. Malebranche is brought within one step of the pantheistic conclusion, and all his Christian feeling and priestly training can do is _just_ to save him from denial of the personality of man.

But even this denial is not the last word of pantheism. When the principle that the finite is known only in relation to the infinite, the individual only in relation to the universal, is interpreted as meaning that the infinite and universal is complete in itself without the finite and individual, when the finite and individual is treated as a mere accidental existence due to the "arbitrary will of God," it ceases to be possible to conceive even God as a spirit. Did Malebranche realize what he was saying when he declared that God was "being in general," but not any particular being? At any rate we can see that the same logic that leads him almost to deny the reality of finite beings, leads him also to seek the divine nature in something more abstract and general even than thought. If we must abstract from all relation to the finite in order to know God as he is, is it not necessary for us also to abstract from self-consciousness, for self-consciousness has a negative element in it that is something definite, and therefore limited? We do not wonder, therefore, when we find Malebranche saying that reason does not tell us that God is a spirit, but only that he is an infinitely perfect being, and that he must be conceived rather as a spirit than as a body simply because spirit is more perfect than body. "When we call God a spirit, it is not so much to show positively what he is, as to signify that he is not material." But as we ought not to give him a bodily form like man's, so we ought not to think of his spirit as similar to our own spirits, although we can conceive nothing more perfect. "It is necessary rather to believe that as he contains in himself the properties of matter without being material, so he comprehends in himself the perfections of created spirits without being a spirit as we alone can conceive spirits, and that his true name is 'He who is,' i.e. Being without restriction, Being infinite and universal."[23] Thus the essentially self-revealing God of Christianity gives way to pure spirit, and pure spirit in its turn to the eternal and incomprehensible substance of which we can say nothing but that it is. The divine substance contains in it, indeed, everything that is in creation, but it contains them _eminenter_ in some incomprehensible form that is reconcilable with its infinitude. But we have no adequate name by which to call it except Being. The curious metaphysic of theology by which, in his later writings, Malebranche tried to make room for the incarnation by supposing that the finite creation, which _as_ finite is unworthy of God, was made worthy by union with Christ, the divine Word, shows that Malebranche had some indistinct sense of the necessity of reconciling his philosophy with his theology; but it shows also the necessarily artificial nature of the combination. The result of the union of such incongruous elements was something which the theologians at once recognised as heterodox and the philosophers as illogical.

There was another doctrine of Malebranche which brought him into trouble with the theologians, and which was the main subject of his long controversy with Arnauld. This was his denial of particular providence. As Leibnitz maintained that this is the best of all possible worlds, and that its evils are to be explained by the negative nature of the finite, so Malebranche, with a slight change of expression derived evil from the nature of particular or individual existence. It is not conformable to the nature of God to act by any but universal laws, and these universal laws necessarily involve

## particular evil consequences, though their ultimate result is the

highest possible good. The question why there should be any particular existence, any existence but God, seeing such existence necessarily involves evil, remains insoluble so long as the purely pantheistic view of God is maintained; and it is this view which is really at the bottom of the assertion that he can have no particular volitions. To the coarse and anthropomorphic conception of particular providence Malebranche may be right in objecting, but on the other hand, it cannot be doubted that any theory in which the universal is absolutely opposed to the particular, the infinite to the finite, is unchristian as well as unphilosophical. For under this dualistic presupposition, there seem to be only two possible alternatives open to thought: either the particular and finite must be treated as something independent of the universal and infinite, which involves an obvious contradiction, or else it must be regarded as absolute nonentity. We find Malebranche doing the one or the other as occasion requires. Thus he vindicates the freedom of man's will on the ground that the universal will of God does not completely determine the particular volitions of man; and then becoming conscious of the difficulty involved in this conception, he tries, like Descartes, to explain the

## particular will as something merely negative, a defect, and not a

positive existence.

Reason and will.

But to understand fully Malebranche's view of freedom and the ethical system connected with it, we must notice an important alteration which he makes in the Cartesian theory of the relation of will and intelligence. To Descartes, as we have seen, the ultimate essence of mind lay in pure abstract self-determination or will, and hence he based even moral and intellectual truth on the arbitrary decrees of God. With Malebranche, on the other hand, abstraction goes a step further; and the absolute is sought not in the subject as opposed to the object, not in pure formal self-determination as opposed to that which is determined, but in a unity that transcends this difference. With him, therefore, will ceases to be regarded as the essence of intelligence, and sinks into a property or separable attribute of it. As we can conceive an extended substance without actual movement, so, he says, we can conceive a thinking substance without actual volition. But "matter or extension without motion would be entirely useless and incapable of that variety of forms for which it is made; and we cannot, therefore, suppose, that an all-wise Being would create it in this way. In like manner, if a spiritual or thinking substance were without will, it is clear that it would be quite useless, for it would not be attracted towards the objects of its perception, and would not love the good for which it is made. We cannot therefore conceive an intelligent being so to fashion it."[24] Now God need not be conceived as creating at all, for he is self-sufficient; but if he be a creator of spirits, he must create them for himself. "God cannot will that there should exist a spirit that does not love him, or that loves him less than any other good."[25] The craving for good in general, for an absolute satisfaction, is a _natural_ love of God that is common to all. "The just, the wicked, the blessed, and the damned all alike love God with this love." Out of this love of God arises the love we have to ourselves and to others, which are the _natural inclinations_ that belong to all created spirits. For these inclinations are but the elements of the love which is in God, and which therefore he inspires in all his creatures. "Il s'aime, il nous aime, il aime toutes ses creatures; il ne fait donc point d'esprits qu'il ne les porte a l'aimer, a s'aimer, et a aimer toutes les creatures."[26] Stripping this thought of its theological vesture, what is expressed here is simply that as a spiritual being each man is conscious of his own limited and individual existence, as well as of the limited and individual existence of other beings like himself, only in relation to the whole in which they are parts, so he can find his own good only in the good of the whole, and he is in contradiction with himself so long as he rests in any good short of that. His love of happiness, his natural inclinations both selfish and social, may be therefore regarded as an undeveloped form of the love of God; and the ideal state of his inclinations is that in which the love of self and of others are explicitly referred to that higher affection, or in which his love does not proceed from a part to the whole, but from the whole to the parts.

Ethics.