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Updated: October 9, 2025
Malebranche, for example, is said to have heard the voice of God calling him. Descartes says that, after a long confinement, he was followed by an invisible person, calling him to pursue his search for truth. Dr. Johnson narrates that he once heard his absent mother calling him. Byron tells us that he was sometimes visited by spectres.
Malebranche eluded the question, and could not assign the paralogism, after which Mairan so earnestly sought: ‘It is not that the paralogism is in such or such places of the Ethique, it is everywhere.’ ” In this impatient judgment, Father Malebranche uttered more truth than he could very well perceive; the paralogism is truly everywhere, because this whole edifice of words, “this frightful chimera,” is really assumed in the arbitrary definition of the term substance.
In order to explain it, Leibnitz invented his harmony, Malebranche premotion, Cudworth a mediator, and Bossuet sees in it a perpetual miracle." "Exactly," said Pécuchet. And they both confessed that they were tired of philosophy. Such a number of systems confused them. Metaphysics is of no use: one can live without it. Besides, their pecuniary embarrassments were increasing.
He began his morning's work, after an hour or two of dispersive chat, with the Port-Royal Logic, Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding, Malebranche, Leibnitz, Descartes. He found these authors in a condition of such perpetual contradiction among themselves, that he formed the chimerical design of reconciling them with one another.
In the science of mind Aristotle and Plato are set aside; the depth of Malebranche, and the patient investigation of Locke have had their day; more penetrating, and concise, and lynx-eyed reasoners of our own country have succeeded; the German metaphysicians seem to have thrust these aside; and it perhaps needs no great degree of sagacity to foresee, that Kant and Fichte will at last fare no better than those that went before them.
M. Cousin fascinated us, but Pierre Leroux, with his tone of profound conviction and his thorough appreciation of the great problems awaiting solution, exercised a still more potent influence, and we did not see the shortcomings of his studies and the sophistry of his mind. My customary course of reading was Pascal, Malebranche, Euler, Locke, Leibnitz, Descartes, Reid, and Dugald Stewart.
It was while he held this office that Fenelon published a book on the "Education of Girls," at the request of the Duchess of Beauvilliers, who asked for guidance in the education of her children. Fenelon sought the friendship of Bossuet, who revised for him his next book, a "Refutation of the System of Malebranche concerning Nature and Grace."
How Descartes, Malebranche, Leibnitz, and many others have been compelled to invent hypotheses and evasions in order to reconcile their discoveries with the reveries and the blunders which religion had rendered sacred!
If we did not follow this doctrine, we should be forced to conclude that almost everything is contrary to the will of Him who made it, and this seems to me a dreadful conclusion. I should like to complain to Father Malebranche about the mice which eat everything here; is that in order? Sugar, fruit, preserves, everything is devoured by them.
He had no taste for the pure mental speculations of Malebranche or Fenelon; and in metaphysics, as in religion, had little patience for what was beyond the good sense of ordinary individuals.
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