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Rh 2. Among the opinions which chiefly characterize the system of Malebranche, the leading one is, that the causes which it is the aim of philosophy to investigate are only occasional causes; and that the Deity is himself the efficient and the immediate cause of every effect in the universe. From this single principle, the greater part of his distinguishing doctrines may be easily deduced; as obvious corollaries.

That we are completely ignorant of the manner in which physical causes and effects are connected, and that all our knowledge concerning them amounts merely to a perception of constant conjunction, had been before remarked by Hobbes, and more fully shown by Glanville in his Scepsis Scientifica. Malebranche, however, has treated the same argument much more profoundly and ably than any of his predecessors, and has, indeed, anticipated Hume in some of the most ingenious reasonings contained in his Essay on Necessary Connexion. From these data, it was not unnatural for his pious mind to conclude, that what are commonly called second causes have no existence; and that the Divine power, incessantly and universally exerted, is, in truth, the connecting link of all the phenomena of nature. It is obvious, that, in this conclusion, he went farther than his premises warranted; for, although no necessary connections among physical events can be traced by our faculties, it does not therefore follow that such connections are impossible. The only sound inference was, that the laws of nature are to be discovered, not, as the ancients supposed, by a priori reasonings from causes to effects, but by experience and observation. It is but justice to Malebranche to own, that he was one of the first who placed in a just and strong light this fundamental principle of the inductive logic.

On the other hand, the objections to the theory of occasional causes, chiefly insisted on by Malebranche’s opponents, were far from satisfactory. By some it was alleged, that it ascribed every event to a miraculous interposition of the Deity; as if this objection were not directly met by the general and constant laws everywhere manifested to our senses,—in a departure from which laws, the very essence of a miracle consists. Nor was it more to the pur-