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Updated: July 9, 2025
In the drawing-room afterward, in spite of the dreadful heat, two fair female friends actually divided one chair between them; I expected to see them run into one every minute, and kept speculating then which they would be, till the idea fascinated me like a thing in a nightmare. I thought of Malebranche hooking the miserable souls that tried to escape back again into the boiling pitch.
Thus it is the nature of omnipotence which renders the motion of bodies even by the Divine Mind credible or conceivable, while, so far as depended on the mere nature of mind, it would have been inconceivable and incredible. If Malebranche had not believed in an omnipotent Being, he would have held all action of mind on body to be a demonstrated impossibility.
It was only the idea of Providence that is, of the particular and circumstantial intervention of God in human affairs, which was intolerable to him and against which he always protested, quoting the phrase of Malebranche, "God does not act by particular wills."
Malebranche said that the first man fell in order that Christ might redeem us, rather than that Christ redeemed us because man had fallen.
"It is not from the hands of the metaphysician," he said, "that atheism has received the weightiest strokes. The sublime meditations of Malebranche and Descartes were less calculated to shake materialism than a single observation of Malpighi's. If this dangerous hypothesis is tottering in our days, it is to experimental physics that such a result is due.
A certain amount of modesty kept me back. The capital question as to the truth of the Christian dogmas and of the Bible never forced itself upon me. I admitted the revelation in a general sense, like Leibnitz and Malebranche. There can be no doubt that my fieri philosophy was the height of heterodoxy, but I did not stop to reason out the consequences.
Father Malebranche, as far as I can learn, was the first that started this abstract theory of morals, which was afterwards adopted by Cudworth, Clarke, and others; and as it excludes all sentiment, and pretends to found everything on reason, it has not wanted followers in this philosophic age.
According to these notions, it is evident, that, following up the system of Malebranche, man has only his faith to guarantee the existence of the world; yet faith itself supposes its existence; if it be not, however, certain that it does exist, and the Bishop of Cloyne, Dr.
Malebranche tells us that one of these mere men of learning, who can only venture to praise antiquity, once said, "I have seen DESCARTES; I knew him, and frequently have conversed with him; he was a good sort of man, and was not wanting in sense, but he had nothing extraordinary in him."
Father Malebranche, by a happy inconsistency, preserved the great moral interests of the world against the invasion of a remorseless logic.
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