Page:Supplement to the fourth, fifth, and sixth editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica - with preliminary dissertations on the history of the sciences - illustrated by engravings (IA gri 33125011196181).pdf/174

120 pose to contend, that the beauty and perfection of the universe were degraded by excluding the idea of mechanism; the whole of this argument turning, as is manifest, upon an application to Omnipotence of ideas borrowed from the limited sphere of human power. As to the study of natural philosophy, it is plainly not at all affected by the hypothesis in question; as the investigation and generalization of the laws of nature, which are its only proper objects, present exactly the same field to our curiosity, whether we suppose these laws to be the immediate effects of the Divine agency, or the effects of second causes, placed beyond the reach of our faculties.

Such, however, were the chief reasonings opposed to Malebranche by Leibnitz, in order to prepare the way for the system of Pre-established Harmony; a system more nearly allied to that of occasional causes than its author seems to have suspected, and encumbered with every solid difficulty connected with the other.

From the theory of occasional causes, it is easy to trace the process which led Malebranche to conclude, that we see all things in God. The same arguments which convinced him, that the Deity carries into execution every volition of the mind, in the movements of the body, could not fail to suggest, as a farther consequence, that every perception of the mind is the immediate effect of the divine illumination. As to the manner in which this illumination is accomplished, the extraordinary hypothesis adopted by Malebranche was forced upon him, by the opinion then universally held, that the immediate objects of our perceptions are not things external, but their ideas or images. The only pos-

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