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114 In addition to the errors, more or less incident to all men, from the unresisted sway of imagination during the fancy of reason, Malebranche had, in his own cage, to struggle with all the prejudices connected with the peculiar dogmas of the Roman Catholic faith. Unfortunately, too, he everywhere discovers a strong disposition to blend his theology and his metaphysics together; availing himself of the one as an auxiliary to the other, wherever, in either science, his ingenuity fails him in establishing a favourite conclusion. To this cause is chiefly to be ascribed the little attention now paid to a writer formerly so universally admired, and, in point of fact, the indisputable author of some of the most refined speculations claimed by the theorists of the eighteenth century. As for those mystical controversies about Grace with Anthony Arnauld, on which he wasted so much of his genius, they have long sunk into utter oblivion; nor should I have here revived the recollection of them, were it not for the authentic record they furnish of the passive bondage in which, little more than a hundred years ago, two of the most powerful minds of that memorable period were held by a creed, renounced, at the Reformation, by all the Protestant countries of Europe; and the fruitful source, wherever it has been retained, of other prejudices, not less to be lamented, of an opposite description.

When Malebranche touches on questions not positively decided by the church, he exhibits a remarkable boldness and freedom of inquiry; setting at nought those human authorities which have so much weight with men of unenlightened erudition; and sturdily opposing his own reason to the most inveterate prejudices of his age. His disbelief in the