Malebranche and his Heirs

Author(s): Richard Acworth

Source: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 38, No. 4 (Oct. - Dec., 1977), pp. 673-676
Published by: University of Pennsylvania Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2708695
Accessed: 06-02-2019 09:21 UTC

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 MALEBRANCHE AND HIS HEIRS

BY RICHARD ACWORTH

The last fifty years have seen in France a great revival of interest in t
philosophy of Malebranche, a revival marked especially by the works of
Henri Gouhier and Martial Gueroult, as well as many others,' and culmi-
nating in the invaluable edition of his Complete Works, edited by Andre
Robinet.2 As a result of these studies, which have not, perhaps, received t
attention they deserve in English-speaking countries, Malebranche's syste
and the development of his thought can now be known with considerabl
exactness. Ferdinand Alquie's new study, however, Le cartesianlsme
Malebranche,3 cuts largely new ground, since it is not only a study of Mal
branche's thought in itself but also an assessment of his place in the gene
history of ideas.
Alquie examines Malebranche's philosophy in detail with a view in the first
place to determining how far he was or was not true to his avowedly Cartesian
inspiration. He concludes that Malebranche was always Cartesian in inten
tion: his basic metaphysical intuitions agreed with those of Descartes, as d
his scientific approach; but his attempt to resolve the problems which De
cartes left open and to extend the Cartesian method to theological ques-
tions which Descartes had left untouched led him to modify the latter's
thought very considerably. As Gouhier showed in his La vocation de Mal
branche and La philosophie de Malebranche et son experience religieu
and as Alquie agrees, Malebranche's adaptation and extension of Cartesian
ism was explicitly Christian in intention. But Alquie shows that Mal
branche's intentions were often contradicted by the natural tendencies o
his thinking, and in particular by his great attraction towards the idea
mechanism. He sees Malebranche as being, quite against his own intentio
a precursor of the skeptical unbelief of the eighteenth century, and trace
and follows out the elements in his thinking which had this effect.
The result is a fascinating study in the origins of an important segmen
of eighteenth-century thought, and one which is bound to lead to a reasse

1 Henri Gouhier, La Philosophie de Malebranche et son Experience Religieuse

(Paris, 1926); La Vocation de Malebranche (Paris, 1926); Martial Gueroult,
Malebranche, 3 vols. (Paris, 1955-59); Armand Cuvillier, Essai sur la Mystique
de Malebranche (Paris, 1954); Ginette Dreyfus, La Volonte selon Malebranche
(Paris, 1958), Yves de Montcheuil, Malebranche et le Quietisme (Paris, 1946);
Joseph Moreau, Malebranche et le Spinozisme (Paris, 1947); Andre Robinet,
Systeme et Existence dans l'Oeuvre de Malebranche (Paris, 1965); Genevieve
Rodis-Lewis, Nicolas Malebranche (Paris, 1963): Beatrice K. Rome, The Phil-
osophy of Malebranche (Chicago, 1963); Craig Walton, De la Recherche du
Bien; A Study of Malebranche's Science of Ethics (The Hague, 1972).
2 Oeuvres Completes de Malebranche, 20 vols., ed. A. Robinet (Paris, 1958 ff.).
3 F. Alquie, Le Cartesianisme de Malebranche (Paris, 1974), 555.

673

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674 RICHARD ACWORTH

ment of Malebranche's historical r6le in

to underestimate the importance of Ma
as Keranflech and Gerdil, who used his i
materialism of the eighteenth century.
these explicit malebranchistes than in
thought anticipated and prepared the w
influence on writers such as Voltaire, M
Malebranche, as Alquie points out, wo
a progeny. And in fact, he agrees, it
tinent there were the orthodox malebra
appealed to Quakers and to devout Non-
liam Law. But his most important Engl
Platonist philosopher and rector of Be
who not only gave Malebranche's idea
incorporated many of them into his ow
himself, was often dismissed as a vision
unorthodoxy. He was later to be one of the favorite authors of John
Wesley. How is it, then, that Malebranche's philosophy appealed so
strongly to John Norris, the devout Christian, while on the continent it
seems to have appealed primarily to freethinkers and deists?
In order to answer this question, it is necessary to examine which aspects
of Malebranche's thought mainly appealed to Norris and which to the
writers of the French Enlightenment. One theory that was accepted by
both was Malebranche's teaching that God acts in the world of nature
in accordance with general laws of great simplicity. Alquie is inclined to
write as if this view was contrary to Christian doctrine, but this does not
seem to be so. In fact it seems to be an evident truth that the natural world
works according to general laws. The Scholastic philosophers accounted fo
this view by means of a theory of created natures and their natural causality,
and Malebranche's theory of general laws is in essence little more than a
transposition of this insight into Occasionalist terms, as Norris, who accepte
Malebranche's view on this subject, pointed out in a passage of consider-
able penetration.4 Such a view does not necessarily exclude the Christian
idea of providence, since God can be seen as choosing, out of an infinity of
possible world orders, the one in which certain particular events would hap
pen.5 Norris at all events had no difficulty in accepting Malebranche
view on this subject.
But if a Christian understanding of providence is not excluded by Male-
branche's theory that God acts in the natural world in accordance wit
simple, general laws, it is in great measure excluded by two other principle
that he held: the extension of occasionalism to the sphere of grace, and the
denial of altruism or disinterested benevolence in God. It is not Male-
branche's theory of Occasionalism and general laws, in itself, that und
mines the Christian idea of providence, but his extension of this type
explanation to the problem of the distribution of grace. Malebranche's th

4 Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World (2 vols., 1701, 1704), Part I, 292
5 This point was made by Nicole, defending Malebranche's view in a le
to Arnauld: F. Alquie, Le Cartesianisme de Malebranche, 453-54.

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 MALEBRANCHE AND HIS HEIRS 675

of nature and grace, and especially his principle t

his own glory and not in any sense out of disinte
creatures, do indeed exclude the traditional Chris
providence and a God of love, but these views wer
Norris followed the general tradition of Christianity
of the principles according to which grace is di
influence on Norris showed itself in the latter's ac
alist theory of sensation and in important elements
edge and love. In these spheres Norris's own thou
Augustinian type of Platonism, and converged wi
But whereas Norris ended by adopting Malebranch
almost in its entirety, and occasionalism helped hi
that desire ought to be reserved for God alone,
branche's denial of disinterested benevolence in God or in man. Indeed
he regarded the fact of the creation as a proof of God's benevolence,6
reconciled this with Malebranche's view that God could act only for hi
by means of the Platonic and Scholastic principle that it is the nature
goodness to diffuse itself. Norris held that man ought to conform his l
to God's, desiring only God but loving creatures with disinterested ben
lence. On these two points, then, on the distribution of grace and on G
reason for creating as well as on God's basic attitude to man, Norris w
decisively closer to Christian tradition than was Malebranche. And th
were the essential matters on which Malebranche pointed towards deism
The aspect of Malebranche's thought that mainly appealed to Norri
on the other hand, was his theory of knowledge with its insistence on
direct vision of the divine Ideas, and its consequent identification of tr
with God. In this view, God is immediately present to every man, and n
only to be recognized. This central assertion of Malebranche's metaphy
which of course did not appeal at all to the writers of the French Enlig
ment, received a warm welcome from both Norris and Malebranche's oth
English admirers. It may perhaps point to a real convergence of M
branche's philosophy and the Protestant emphasis on the individual per
direct access to God, especially where this direct access was seen in Plat
terms. At all events, Norris shared with Malebranche a basic approach
God, apprehended as present to the soul in the form of truth, which
not appeal to most of Malebranche's French readers.7
In fact it seems that the ideas which the Enlightenment took over f
Malebranche-the insistence that God acts only by simple, general laws

6 A Discourse concerning Divine Providence, in Practical Discourses up

several Divine Subjects, II, 214-15.
7 On Norris, cf. F. J. Powicke, A Dissertation on John Norris of Bemerto
(London, 1894); F. I. Mackinnon, The Philosophy of John Norris of Beme
(Philosophical Monographs, Psychological Review Publications, Vol. I, N
Baltimore, 1910); J. Muirhead, The Platonic Tradition in Anglo-Saxon Ph
osophy (London, 1931). The fullest account is my thesis, La Philosophie d
John Norris (1657-1712), presented to the Sorbonne in 1970 and now publish
by the University of Lille III (Service de Reproduction des Theses), obtai
from Librairie Honore Champion, Paris.

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676 RICHARD ACWORTH

denial of the divine benevolence and of a

of mechanistic types of explanation to a
derived by Malebranche from the genera
and were comparatively peripheral to hi
central intuition of the immediate prese
condition of all knowledge appealed to N
influence on the subsequent history of id
widespread picture of Malebranche as a m
a surprising way the importance of his
century thought. But the fundamental l
is perhaps this, that the general climate
period is more important than a philo
sights in determining which of his ideas pro

Derby College of Higher Education, Eng

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