The life of a valetudinarian so retired, and bound by the restraints of a rigid religious order, offers few in- cidents for curious investigation. The calm and equa- ble tenor of Malebranche's frail existence was pro- longed till he had entered his seventy-eighth year,Mlien, in another form of existence, he may be believed to have entered upon that "vision of all things in God" which, with piniis enthusiasm, lie had endeavored to an- ticipate on earth. . He died in Paris Oct. 13, 1715, a year and a month before his great contemporar}- Leibnitz.
Philosophy. — The cardinal tenet of the philosophy t.f Malebranche, which contradistinguishes it from that of Des Cartes, of Spinoza, of Leibnitz, etc., of the reform- ing and of the ac(iuicscing acolytes of the Cartesian
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school, is the doctrine of seeirt/7 all t!iiiir/s in God,to which such frequent reference has aheady been made. The motive, the meaning, the genesis of this doctrine, and its r^'lation to antecedent, contemporary, and subsequent specidation, are unintelhgible, unless it is contemplated in connection with the dogmas of Des Cartes and their development. Dos Cartes (q. v.) recognised only two essences in the universe, thought and extension, which witli him were the equivalents of mind and matter.
The mystery, the enigma, which presents itself in such eniUess forms, and which inevitably returns with all the Protean changes of metaphysical speculation— wliich cannot be evaded in the study of that strange microcosm, Man, in which body and soul are so inti- mately, ami, apparently, so everlastingly united — which cannot be overlooked in ascertaining the interaction of the mens sana or iiisana, and the corpus saimm or insa- num, or in determining the grounds of moral obligation — the wondrous riddle is, how can mind act upon mat- ter, or matter act upon mind, and the one regulate or af- fect the other. The diversity of the unsatisfactory so- lutions will ba seen by comparing the explanations pro- pounded by Des Cartes, Leibnitz, Spinoza, and Herbert Spencer. Des Cartes, recognising the impossibility of any solution in the relations of the transitory creation, as he had arbitrarily conceived it, and with the absolute divorce of the two existences postulated by him, intro- duced a Deus ex muchiaa, and imagined a divine inter- position to effect concurrent action on every occasion where the joint operation of intellectual and physical nature was manifested. To this hypothesis has been given the name of the doctrine of Assistunc//. This scheme is assuredly obnoxious to the sharp censure of Aristotle on some of his precursers, and renders the ac- tive intelligence of the human race a mere collection of intrusive episodes, like a miserable tragedy (Metaph. xi, x-xiii, iii). The explanation was soon discovered to be not merely a presumption, but utterly inefficacious, and of most pernicious tendency. Obvioush^, it made the creating and sustaining God the direct agent in man's actions in all cases where inward contemplation pro- ceeded to outward act, and it made the universe a com- plicated piece of puppetry, whose motions were commu- nicated by a hidden personage constantly jerking at the strings. The logical inconsistency of maintaining an entire separation between the grand constituents of human nature, and of requiring divine intervention for all effective manifestation of human thought, offended the acute perspicacity of Spinoza. He sought to re- store harmony and congruity to the philosophical in- terpretation of the intelligible world, by considering thought and action, mind and matter, as only ciiluences, phenomenal coruscations, from the one, sole, independ- ent, self-sustaining, eternal, all-embracing Existence, which did not so much support and regulate, as con- stitute and contain alike the whole creation and the Creator. This, of course, pushed Cartesianism to the absurdity of its logical extreme, but annihilated all moral responsibility, all distinctions of nature, annulled all individual existence, establishing, in short, a ]iure Pantheism. But Pantheism, whether Stoic, Platonic. Spinozistic, or ScheUingistic, is the negation of a per- sonal God, of all separable existence, and of all the du- ties, the hopes, and the fears that spring from human obligations to a heavenly Father, and to a divine Cre- ator and beneficent Governor of the universe.
About the same time that Spinoza was secretly en- gaged in transmuting Cartesianism into Pantheism, and probably independently of any impulse from his inves- tigations, Malebranche endeavored to uphold and en- force the obligations which \vere nullified b}' the Spino- zistic system, to preserve all the dogmas of revealed re- ligion, to fortify the sense of religious duty, to escape the hazards and aberrations of the Cartesian theory, are yet to uphold the Cartesian doctrine in its essential characteristics, by correcting its excesses, and by indi- cating the means of conciliation between the two widely
separated constituents of his creation. The Cartesian fantasy of assistancy he supplanted by his o\vn cele- brated hypothesis of Occasional Causes. Instead of sup- posing all material motion, in accordance with the move- ments of the apparently moving mmd, to be due to a mechanical impulse of the Divinity, disconnected from human intelligence, he imagined that aU such phenom- ena were pro\-oked by images of change refiected from the divine mind, and that human knowledge and action proceeded exclusively from seeing all things in God.