MALEBRANCHE, NICOLAS. - Theologian, philosopher and scientist, b. in Paris on 6 Aug. 1638, d. there on 13 Oct. 1715. In 1660 he entered the Oratory founded by Cardinal de Bérulle, protector of Descartes. In 1664, having been ordained a priest, his reading of Descartes's Traité de l'homme, published at that time by Clerselier, turned him with philosophical passion toward the Cartesian system.
In 1674-75 he published the Recherche de la vérité, in 6 vols., his principal work (composed in 1668-74, Latin trans. 1691, English 1694; definitive ed. 1712). The theory of ideas contained in it provoked a long controversy, among many others, with Antoine 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 adversaries both in Bossuet and in Arnauld (1685), who obtained its condemnation to 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; in 1715 the Réflexions sur la promotion physique. In 1699 he was called to the Académie des Sciences; notable in this field are his memoirs: on the communication of movements (1682; 2nd ed. 1699; he applies the law of universal attraction to "small vortices" or atomic movements); on the different apparent magnitudes of the sun and the moon at the horizon and at the meridian (1693, in controversy with the Cartesian H. Régis); on light, colors and fire (read at the Academy on 4 Apr. 1699). He collaborated with De l'Hôpital on differential calculus, and also occupied himself with entomology. Ascetic 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 the reprint of the memoir on the possibility of transubstantiation [1682]). His death, after a long illness, was preceded by a lively discussion with the English philosopher Berkeley (v.). He maintained philosophical correspondences of historical importance with Fr. André, a Cartesian, with the mathematician J. J. Dortous (d'Ortous) de Mairan (1678-1771) concerning Spinozism, with Leibniz concerning the foundations of metaphysics and pre-established harmony. A polished and disciplined writer, he enjoyed immense fame in his own times and through the 18th-19th centuries as the "Christian Plato"; he has remained one of the classics of French and European philosophy.
Although his principal works were placed on the Index, he had fervent followers among the Oratorians themselves, such as Frs. Thomassin, B. Lamy, Roche, Lelevel, Fédé, his contemporaries; continuators and apologists, such as Fr. André, the abbé de Lamion, C. Leport de la Morinière; imitators, such as the Italian Fr. Giovenale (Trent 1686) and the so-called egocentrists or solipsists of the 18th 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) for a return to Augustinianism and its motives 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 with the postulates of occasional causes and pre-established harmony. M., abhorring the pantheistic conclusions to which Spinoza had arrived from occasionalism, sought to fuse the two currents in their common Platonic inspiration. His original inspiration consists in attributing to the human will, as free will and love of the true and the good, the consent necessary for the formulation of judgments and reasonings on the part of the intellect, which is 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 the skepticism of suspension of judgment, and error, whose sources are of a practical nature: but it is led only toward intellectual evidence. Therefore sensibles, images and pure space (étendue en soi) are nothing but ideas, accepted by man as he does for those of science. The world of bodies exists only as a probable, inductive hypothesis; to them man attributes the extension he intuits, just as he attributes to other souls his own spiritual life. The belief in a direct relation of the soul with 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 are extended by judgment to supposed bodies, but do not derive from these, nor are they substantial forms. The world of the senses certainly alludes to the world of bodies: but it is true, or false, by the ideas (clear and distinct) that one has of it, or by the error of confused consents (I. I). The same must be said for the imagination in relation to the phenomena of the nervous system: to which it corresponds in time and in intention and in the natural and divine laws that it represents, but it is superior to them and independent of them in productive activity. To this M. devotes a careful study of psychological, pathological and literary forms, with particular criticism, for excesses of imagination, of Seneca and of Montaigne (I. II).
Senses and images are therefore not effects of corporeal realities, but modifications of thought, which is the only essential form of the spirit. Thought has as its objects the ideas, in themselves always clear and distinct, but not produced by the soul, rather present to it as intuited in God; while the soul has in itself, and from itself, only an immediate self-consciousness of its own volitional and arbitrary life, akin to the consciousness of the infinite as a negative idea. The ideas were produced by God as universal and archetypal forms, participants in his essence (but not in his substance): he proposes to the soul, which depends on him, the singular cases of them, 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 (subjective for God alone). Even the extension in which bodies are localized is an idea of God, the étendue intelligible, indeed all the ideas of corporeal things are its modifications and subordinate to it (I. III).
This theory was contested by critics as similar to Spinozism; but more criticized, starting from Arnauld, were objective idealism and the pragmatic motive assigned to the distinction between true and false ideas. The method to which M. arrives is in fact founded (I. VI) on the exercise of the power of attention, as a bond between will and knowledge, and on the development of the idea of the infinite, as having its positive form in God and in extension: the sciences that best correspond to these requirements being the mathematical ones, logic is therefore 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 of a practical nature. The Aristotelian method, examined in the De coelo (VI, 2, 5), is declared devoid of clarity and distinctness; but it is certain that the renunciation of realism, whether classical or modern, opens the way to subjective, Berkeleian idealism.
I, II, IV and V of the Recherche are devoted to a profound analysis of the inclinations or spiritual movements (toward the good: curiosity; toward being and well-being: the desire to know; toward one's fellow men: 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 doctrine characteristic of M.: the general occasional cause that unites volitional acts to ideas (as reciprocal occasional causes), and makes them sensible, is Christ as universal mediator between God and man. Christ is the Reason, which gives life an immutable order and renders superfluous the search for the order of nature. The love of order, or charity, in its free, habitual and dominant form, makes up for the insufficiency of free will and constitutes virtue. To man's love of order, or benevolence, there comes to aid the unitive love on God's part, Grace: but it leaves the spirit free. The system of duties toward God, toward society and toward oneself follows these principles, but is inspired by all three divine Persons.
M.'s metaphysics develops the proof of the existence of God 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 by revelation: from pain, from the synthesis between intellectual vision and feeling, from the order of ideas in intelligible space. Their creation by the infinitely perfect Being is not, however, necessary, and therefore does not admit of demonstration. Creation is free like every act of God, and represents the full unfolding of his being. The 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 of a providential order, and concerns itself with the infinitely great as with the infinitely small, with order and harmony as with the combinations of events. The same divine Providence 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 how to overcome sin, or the inversion of the relations between body and soul. Providence grants to the Church, preserver of religion and promoter of the love of God, infallibility. But the faith that it nourishes is subject to the 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 the same divine Grace, that which determines the acts of Providence toward men and the efficacy of the Sacraments (habitual love). The love of God must be disinterested and directed to Him for his own sake. It saves the soul in death, reducing this to a simple separation from the body and to the return of the will into the beatitude of ideal truth in God; while its condemnation would be to be 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 ingenuous contemplative tendencies of his Platonism.