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[Malebranche.]
He contests Aristotle, who said: “Only in mathematics should one seek complete certainty; but morality and physics are sciences in which probability alone suffices.” As for morality, Aristotle was right, for action requires that probability alone suffice in it. As for physics, probability alone also suffices there for the satisfaction of the mind, which, for its repose and its use, needs only to see or glimpse order in all things. But this probability does not suffice in physics for mechanics, which is its practice, as morality is the practical part of metaphysics. Now if probability suffices in morality, plausibility also suffices in metaphysics, its theory and its practice being able to content themselves with it.
“...After he had sinned (Adam), those pleasures that merely warned him with respect and those pains that, without disturbing his felicity, merely made him know that he could lose it and become unhappy, no longer showed him the same consideration.” There are pains and pleasures (two modes) become, by necessity, poetic and active beings under the pen of this man who has so disparaged every kind of imagination without distinction! It appears that at bottom he was the enemy only of the imagination that admits logical beings too readily and of the imagination that in practice treats phantoms as solid realities, etc.
“Souls in beasts... intentional species... or such things (he says) of which one finds no particular notion in one’s mind.” What one can find no prior notion of in one’s mind must be rejected, for it can be of no use for clarity... But the notions we have suffice to make us conceive or even imagine a kind of Soul in beasts.
As for intentional species, their designation is obscure and repellent, and perhaps that is the worst thing about them, for if their proponents had meant by them kinds of images fitted to sustain and fix attention without being seen, perhaps admitting them would have afforded a convenience, an ease in explaining certain things, that would have justified their invention. Provided the mind is not the dupe of its own hypotheses and does not treat its mere suppositions as realities, it should be allowed to make them, and to hold as good all those useful in use. In physics, the use of “attraction” has served very well; but one ends by believing in it too much.
“Five or six paces from us.” It seems that, according to his observation, this was the distance at which almost all natural objects cease to be dangerous to us. As for invented objects, inventions protect us from them, and it comes back to my memory that the invention of gunpowder (for example) and that of optical lenses have approximately the same date.
“I am persuaded that the soul can reside directly only in ideas.” Places worthy of such a guest!
“All men know extent through a clear idea that represents it.” So with movement. So with God himself. Shall I dare say it? Yes. One conceives him easily, provided one does not force oneself to define him.
To hear him, and in the strict sense of the words as he defines them, there would be no involuntary error (nor forced error). He should also say that in many matters we are under no obligation not to be mistaken, and that truth is not always duty.
He never takes imagination as anything but a bodily faculty and the memory of images. Etc..
“The depth and distinctness of imagination’s vertigos depends on the strength of the animal spirits and on the constitution of the brain’s fibers.” What! never on the soul and the soul alone? Is it good, in metaphysics, to explain everything in this way through matter alone, through fluids and solids? — The quality of the marrows, their quantity, the dimension of their sheaths could perhaps also be counted. But it would perhaps be wise and useful to admit some difference in quality in the very substance of souls as well. Are they destined in life for the same duties, and in heaven for the same rewards? Among them all there is likeness by their nature, but perhaps not parity among all without exception. And there are several orders of souls. There is none that surpasses all the others and that many others do not equal; but there are some that, called to higher virtues and higher thoughts, have wings to fly there. Responsible for all the extraordinary gifts they have received, guilty if they abuse them.
Whether (whatever he may say) one could not imagine without disadvantage that “the body becomes mind when it unites with mind.” It would be a very good way of expressing certain mechanisms of the body that approach intelligence.
Men have “a natural inclination to attach their ideas to sensible signs.” There is the whole mystery of the invention of speech.
He thinks that, without this communication he supposes between the mother’s brain and the child’s, “women and animals could not easily engender young of the same species.” This opinion is indeed that of a metaphysician, that is to say, of a man who must seek to explain bodies through minds.