Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 5.djvu/163

] sufficient ; but if lie be a creator of spirits, he must create them for himself. &quot; God cannot will that there should exist a spirit that does not love him, or that loves him less than any other good,&quot; The craving for good in general, for an absolute satisfaction, is a natural love of God that is common to all &quot; The just, the wicked, the blessed, and the damned all alike love God with this love.&quot; Out of this love of God arises the love we have to ourselves and to others, which are the natural inclinations that belong to all created spirits. For these inclinations are but the elements of the love which is in God, and which therefore he inspires in all his creatures &quot; II Jaime, il nous aime, il aime toules ses creatures ; il ne fait done point d esprits qu il ne les porte ci Vaimer, a s aimer, et. & aimer toutes les creatures&quot; Stripping this thought of its theological vesture, what is expressed here is simply that as a spiritual being each man is conscious of his own limited and individual existence, as well as of the limited and individual existence of other beings like himself, only in relation to the whole in which they are parts, so he can find his own good only in the good of the whole, and he is in contradiction with himself so long as he rests in any good short of that. His love of happiness, his natural inclinations both selfish and social, may be therefore regarded as an undeveloped form of the love of God ; and the ideal state of his inclinations is that in which the love of self and of others are explicitly referred to that higher affection ; or in which his love does not proceed from a part to the whole, but from the whole to the parts. The question of morals to Malebranche is the question how these natural inclinations are related to the particular passions. Sensation and passion arise out of the connec tion of body and soul, and their use is only to urge us to attend to the wants of the former. We can scarcely hear without a smile the simple monastic legend which Male branche weaves together about the original nature of the passions and their alteration by the Fall &quot; It is visibly a disorder that a spirit capable of knowing and loving God should be obliged to occupy itself with the needs of the body.&quot; &quot;A being altogether occupied with what passes in his body and with the infinity of objects that surround it, cannot be thinking on the things that are truly good.&quot; Hence the necessity of an immediate and instinctive warn ing from the senses in regard to the relations of things to our organism, and also .of pains and pleasures which may induce us to attend to this warning. &quot; Sensible pleasure is the mark that nature has attached to the use of certain things in order that without having the trouble of examin ing them by reason, we may employ them for the preserva tion of the body, but not in order that we may love them.&quot; Till the Fall the mind was merely united to the body, not subjected to it, and the influence of these pleasures and paius was only such as to make men attend to their bodily wants, but not to occupy the mind, or fill it with sensuous joys and sorrows, or trouble its contemplation of that which is really good. Our moral aim should therefore be to restore this state of things, to weaken our union with the body and strengthen our union with God. And to encourage us in pursuing this aim we have to remember that union with God is natural to the spirit, and that, while even the condition of union with the body is artificial, the condition of subjection to the body is wholly unnatural to it. Our primary tendency is towards the supreme good, and we only love the objects of our passions in so far as we &quot; determine towards particular, and there fore false goods, the love that God gives us for himself.&quot; The search for happiness is really the search for God in disguise, and even the levity and inconstancy with winch men rush from one finite good to another, is a proof that they were made for the infinite. Furthermore, this natural love of God, or inclination for good in general, &quot; gives us the power of suspending our consent in regard to those particular goods which do not satisfy it.&quot; If we refuse to be led by the obscure and confused voice of instinctive feeling, which arises from and always tends to confirm our union with the body, and wait for the light of reason which arises from and always tends to confirm our union with God, we have done all that is in our power, the rest is God s work. &quot; If we only judge precisely of that which we see clearly, we shall never be deceived. For then it will not be we that judge, but the universal reason that judges in us.&quot; And as our love, even of particular goods, is a confused love of the supreme good, so the clear vision of God inevitably brings with it the love of Him. &quot;We needs must love the highest when we see it.&quot; When it is the divine reason that speaks in us it is the divine love that moves us, &quot; the same love wherewith God loves himself and the things he has made.&quot; The general result of the ethics of Malebranche is ascetic. The passions like the senses have no relation to the higher life of the soul ; their value is only in relation to the union of soul and body, a union which is purely accidental or due to the arbitrary will of God. As Pericles said of women that the less they were heard of in public for good or evil the better, so Malebranche would say of the sensa tions and passions, that the more silently they discharge their provisional function, and the less they disturb or interfere with the pure activity of spirit, the more nearly they approach to the only perfection that is possible for them. Their ideal state is to remain or become again simple instincts that act mechanically like the circulation of the blood. Universal light of reason casts no ray into the obscurity of sense ; its universal love cannot embrace any of the objects of particular passion. It is indeed recognized by Malebranche that sensation in man is mixed with thought, that the passions in him are forms of the love of good in general. But this union of the rational with the sensuous nature is regarded merely as a confusion which is to be cleared up, not in a higher unity of the two elements, but simply by the withdrawal of the spirit from contact with that which darkens and defiles it. Of a trans formation of sense into thought, of passion into duty, an elevation of the life of sense till it becomes the embodi ment and expression of the life of reason, Malebranche has no conception. Hence the life of reason turns with him to mysticism in theory and to asceticism in practice. His universal is abstract and opposed to the particular ; instead of explaining it, it explains it away. A certain tender beauty as of twilight is spread over the world as we view it through the eyes of this cloistered philosopher, and we do not at first see that the softness and ideality of the picture is due to the gathering darkness. Abstraction seems only to be purifying, and not destroying, till it has done its perfect work. Malebranche conceived himself to be present ing to the world only the purest and most refined expression of Christian ethics and theology. But if we obey his own continual advice to think clearly and distinctly, if we divest his system of all the sensuous and imaginative forms in which he has clothed it, and reduce it to the naked simplicity of its central thought, what we find is not a God that reveals Himself in the finite and to the finite, but the absolute substance which has no revelation, and whoso existence is the negation of all but itself. Thus to tear away the veil, however, there was needed a stronger, simpler, 