Page:Ferrier's Works Volume 1 - Institutes of Metaphysic (1875 ed.).djvu/515

RhPROP. IX.———— to an intelligent mind—for, however much we may deceive ourselves on this point, it is certain that we cannot believe in that which we cannot, by any possibility, think of—and it is certain that we can think of material things only in association with our own, or some other, intelligence.

10. Mallebranche, following in the wake of Des Cartes, advocated similar opinions. He perceived, and avoided, the contradiction involved in the supposition that material things cause our cognitions. Our perceptions of extension, figure, and solidity (the primary qualities, as they are called), he attributed to the direct operation of the Deity. This is what he means by our "vision of all things in God," who, according to Mallebranche, is the "light of all our seeing." Our sensations of heat, colour, and so forth, he referred to certain laws of our own nature. Although material things are superfluous and otiose by the terms of this, no less than by the terms of the Cartesian hypothesis, still Mallebranche asserts their independent existence on the authority of revelation, as Des Cartes had attempted to vindicate it on the ground of natural belief—"In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth"—as if that statement was equivalent to the declaration that material things were invested with an absolute existence, and had a subsistency out of relation to all intelligence!