MALEBRANCHE, NICOLAS. – Theologian, philosopher, and scientist, born in Paris on 6 August 1638, died there on 13 October 1715. In 1660 he entered the Oratory founded by Cardinal De Beroule, the protector of Descartes. In 1664, after being ordained a priest, his reading of Descartes’ Traité de l'homme, published at that time by Clerselier, directed him with philosophical enthusiasm toward the Cartesian system.
In 1674–75 he published the Recherche de la vérité, in 6 volumes, his principal work (composed in 1668–74, Latin translation 1691, English 1694; definitive edition 1712). The theory of ideas contained in it provoked, among many others, a long controversy with Antonio Arnauld (cf. Des vraies et des fausses idées, 1683): the collection of M.’s Réponses (1648–1704) appeared in 1709. In 1686 the Traité de la nature et de la Grâce appeared: imitated by Leibniz, it found opponents both in Bossuet and in Arnauld (1685), who secured its condemnation by the Index (1690). In 1683 he also published the Méditations chrétiennes et métaphysiques (2nd ed., 1699) and the Traité de morale (2nd ed. 1684; 3rd ed. 1697; enlarged by the Traité de l'amour de Dieu; 4th ed. 1704); in 1688 the Entretiens sur la métaphysique et sur la religion (2nd ed., 1692, with the Entr. sur la mort; 3rd ed. 1711); in 1708 the Entretien d'un philosophe chrétien avec un philosophe chinois sur l'existence et la nature de Dieu; and in 1715 the Réflexions sur la promotion physique. In 1699 he was called to the Académie des Sciences. Particularly noteworthy in this field are his memoirs: on the communication of motion (1682; 2nd ed. 1699; applying the law of universal attraction to “small vortices” or atomic movements); on the differing apparent sizes of the sun and moon at the horizon and at the meridian (1693, in controversy with the Cartesian H. Régis); and on light, colors, and fire (read at the Academy on 4 April 1699). He collaborated with De l’Hôpital on differential calculus and also concerned himself with entomology. Ascetical works: Conversation chrétienne (1673); Petites méditations chrétiennes (1677); Petites méditations pour se disposer à l'humilité et à la Pénitence (1677); Traité de l'infini créé; Traité de la Confession et de la Communion (posthumous, 1760, with a reprinting of the memoir on the possibility of transubstantiation [1682]). His death, after a long illness, was preceded by a lively BERGER, ELIE (v.). He maintained philosophically important correspondence with Fr. André, a Cartesian; with the mathematician J. J. Dortous (d’Ortous) de Mairan (1678–1771) concerning Spinozism; and with Leibniz concerning the foundations of metaphysics and pre-established harmony. An elegant and disciplined writer, he enjoyed immense fame in his own time and throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as the “Christian Plato”; he has remained one of the classics of French and European philosophy.
Despite the fact that his principal works were placed on the Index, he had fervent followers among the Oratorians themselves, such as Fathers Thomassin, B. Lamy, Roche, Lelevel, and Fédé, his contemporaries; continuators and apologists, such as Father André, the Abbé de Lamion, and C. Leport de la Morinière; and imitators, such as the Italian Father Giovenale (Trento 1686) and the so-called egocentrists or solipsists of the eighteenth century (A. Collier).
The doctrine of the Recherche de la vérité derives from two theoretical-historical problems: that of the Oratorians themselves (Gibieu, 1630; Martin, 1671), involving a return to Augustinianism and its motifs of interiority, voluntarism, and Platonic ideology; and that of post-Cartesian occasionalism (Geulincx [v.], Clauberg, and others), arising from the analysis of the relations between spirit and matter, soul and body, and resolved through the postulates of occasional causes and pre-established harmony. M., abhorring the pantheistic conclusions to which Spinoza had brought occasionalism, sought to fuse the two currents in their common Platonic inspiration. His original contribution consists in attributing to the human will, as free will and love of truth and goodness, the consent necessary for the intellect to formulate judgments and reasonings, the intellect being purely contemplative and passive, that is, a part of the powers of the agent intellect. This consent, substituted for, or identified with, theoretical assent, overcomes skepticism as abstention from judgment, as well as error, whose sources are practical in nature; but it is directed only toward intellectual evidence. Thus sensible things, images, and pure space (étendue en soi) are nothing more than ideas, accepted by man in the same way as those of science. The world of bodies exists only as a probable, inductive hypothesis; man attributes to bodies the extension that he intuits, just as he attributes his spiritual life to other souls.
The belief in a direct relation between the soul and the spatial world, in which the causes of sensible impressions would be localized, is erroneous: sensible qualities and even the duration of phenomena are passions of the subject, which judgment extends to supposed bodies, but which do not derive from them, nor are they substantial forms. The world of the senses certainly alludes to the world of bodies; but it is true or false according to the (clear and distinct) ideas one has of it, or according to the error of confused consents (I. I). The same is true of the imagination in relation to the phenomena of the nervous system: it corresponds to them in time, intention, and the natural and divine laws that it represents, but in its productive activity it is superior to and independent of them. M. devotes to this a careful study of psychological, pathological, and literary forms, with particular criticism, on account of excesses of imagination, of Seneca and Montaigne (I. II).
The senses and images are therefore not effects of corporeal realities, but modifications of thought, which is the sole essential form of the spirit. Thought has ideas as its objects, ideas that are always clear and distinct in themselves, but are not produced by the soul; rather, they are present to it as intuited in God. The soul, meanwhile, possesses in itself and by itself only an immediate self-consciousness of its own volitional and arbitrary life, akin to consciousness of the infinite as a negative idea. Ideas were produced by God as universal and archetypal forms, participating in his essence (but not in his substance); he presents to the soul, which depends upon him, their individual instances in relation to the inclinations of the will. Man therefore sees everything in God, and knows God in his ideas, which for him are objective (for God alone, subjective). The extension in which bodies are localized is likewise an idea of God, the étendue intelligible; indeed, all ideas of corporeal things are his modifications and subordinate to it (I. III).
This theory was challenged by critics as resembling Spinozism; but even more heavily criticized, beginning with Arnauld, were objective idealism and the pragmatic basis assigned to the distinction between true and false ideas. The method reached by M. is in fact founded (I. VI) on the exercise of the power of attention, as the link between will and knowledge, and on the development of the idea of the infinite, which has its positive form in God and in extension. Since the sciences that best correspond to these requirements are mathematics, logic is consequently identified with mathematics. The initial formulas are those of the Cartesian method itself (evidence, clarity and distinctness, progress from the simple to the complex, complete analysis), but their development is practical in character. The Aristotelian method, examined in the De coelo (VI, 2, 5), is declared lacking in clarity and distinctness; but it is certain that the renunciation of realism, both classical and modern, opens the way to Berkeleyan subjective idealism.
I, II, IV, and V of the Recherche are devoted to a profound analysis of inclinations or spiritual movements (toward the good: curiosity; toward being and well-being: the desire to know; toward one’s fellow human beings: friendship) and of the passions or bonds between the spirit and sensible objects, whence love and error.
To this psychology the Traité de morale adds another characteristic doctrine of M.: the general occasional cause that unites volitional acts with ideas (as reciprocal occasional causes), and makes them become sensible, is Christ as the universal mediator between God and man. Christ is Reason, which gives life an immutable order and renders the search for the order of nature superfluous. Love of order, or charity, in its free, habitual, and dominant form, compensates for the insufficiency of free will and constitutes virtue. Human love of order, or benevolence, is aided by God’s unitive love, Grace; but Grace leaves the spirit free. The system of duties toward God, society, and oneself follows these principles, but is inspired by all three divine Persons.
M.’s metaphysics develops the proof of God’s existence as suggested by the idea of the infinite in its perception; but this idea does not represent God in himself, whose substance is superior and transcendent to every idea.
The proofs of the existence of bodies are supplied by revelation: through pain, through the synthesis between intellectual vision and feeling, and through the order of ideas in intelligible space. Their creation by the infinitely perfect Being is not, however, necessary, and therefore does not permit demonstration. Creation is free, like every act of God, and represents the full development of his being. Ideas are his infinite attributes, and intelligible extension is not only one of them, but contains the possibility of the creation of infinitely many possible worlds (v. LEIDNIZ). Divine action toward the world of bodies is providential in character, and concerns itself as much with the infinitely great as with the infinitely small, with order and harmony as with the combinations of events. Divine Providence likewise regulates the union of soul and body according to the system of occasional causes, which subordinates the body to the soul in the state of Grace; and it governs the world of souls.
Religion teaches the overcoming of sin, or the inversion of the relations between body and soul. Providence grants infallibility to the Church, the guardian of religion and promoter of the love of God. But the faith that it nourishes is subject to Reason incarnate in Christ: ecclesiastical reason is reason humbled before God. Acts of worship, as expressions of human desires for Grace (actual love), are the particular occasional cause of that same divine Grace, which determines the acts of Providence toward human beings and the efficacy of the Sacraments (habitual love). Love of God must be disinterested and directed toward Him for his own sake. It saves the soul in death, reducing the latter to a simple separation from the body and to the return of the will to the beatitude of ideal truth in God; whereas its condemnation would consist in being subjected to the material world. It would still exist in God, but as a negation of itself, like the demons and Hell, which are the negation of his light. These paradoxical formulas explain the opposition encountered by M. far more than the naïve contemplative tendencies of his Platonism.