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/176

122 mited, like a barrel-organ, to a specific number of tunes. But is it not a fairer inference, that the province of pure Imagination, unbounded as it may at first appear, is narrow, when compared with the regions opened by truth and nature to our powers of observation and reasoning? Prior to the time of Bacon, the physical systems of the learned performed their periodical revolutions in orbits as small as the metaphysical hypotheses of their successors; and yet, who would now set any bounds to our curiosity in the study of the material universe? Is it reasonable to think, that the phenomena of the intellectual world are less various, or less marked with the signatures of Divine wisdom?

It forms an interesting circumstance in the history of the two memorable persons who have suggested these remarks, that they had once, and only once, the pleasure of a short interview. “The conversation,” we are told, “turned on the non-existence of matter. Malebranche, who had an inflammation in his lungs, and whom Berkeley found preparing a medicine in his cell, and cooking it in a small pipkin, exerted his voice so violently in the heat of their dispute, that he increased his disorder, which carried him off a few days after.” It is impossible not to regret, that of this interview there is no other record;—or rather, that Berkeley had not made it the ground-work of one of his own dialogues. Fine as his imagination was, it could scarcely have added to the picturesque effect of the real scene. This interview happened in 1715, when Berkeley was in the thirty-first, and Malebranche in the seventy-seventh year of his age. What a change in the state of the philosophical world (whether for the better or worse is a different question) has taken place in the course of the intervening century!

Dr Warburton, who, even when he thinks the most unsoundly, always possesses the rare merit of thinking for himself, is one of the very few English authors who have spoken of Malebranche with the respect due to his extraordinary talents. “All you say of Malebranche,” he observes in a letter to Dr Hurd, “is strictly true; he is an admirable writer. There is something very different in the fortune of Malebranche and Locke. When Malebranche first appeared, it was with a general applause and admiration; when Locke first published his Essay, he had hardly a single approver. Now Locke is universal, and Malebranche sunk into obscurity. All this may be easily accounted for. The intrinsic merit of either was out of the question. But Malebranche supported his first appearance on a philosophy in the highest vogue; that philosophy has been overturned by the Newtonian, and Malebranche has fallen with his master. It was to no purpose to tell the world, that Malebranche could stand without him. The public never examines so narrowly. Not but that there was another cause sufficient to do the business; and that is, his debasing his noble work with his system of seeing all things in God. When this happens to a great author, one half of his readers out of folly, the other out of malice, dwell only on the unsound part, and forget the other, or use all their arts to have it forgotten.

“But the sage Locke supported himself by no system on the one hand; nor, on the other, did he dishonour himself by any whimsies. The consequence of which was, that, neither following the fashion, nor

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