Free A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein, Second Edition by Unknown Author

mysticism only a narrow region of carefully circumscribed darkness. Malebranche had thoroughly absorbed the principles and proofs of the Cartesian philosophy, but, like many who were convinced that Descartes’ method was both valid and comprehensive, he remained unsatisfied with the Cartesian picture of the relation between body and soul.
    Descartes’ views of causation are such that there is a prima facie contradiction between the thesis that body and soul are (or exemplify) separate substances, and the thesis that there is also interaction between them. Malebranche did not seek to question the Cartesian idea of substance, although his writings are remarkable for containing an extended metaphysics from which that idea could be eliminated without detriment to the system’s integrity. Instead, he questioned the theory of causation implicit in Descartes: the theory that the states of a substance must be explained in terms of its essential nature. It seemed to Malebranche that such a theory could explain neither our ability to perceive the material world, nor our ability to act on it. Furthermore (and in this he showed how much he had let the Cartesian conception of material substance fall into the background of his philosophy, replacing it with the more modern idea of the material object), he even regarded it as incompatible with the view that there is causal action between separate bodies, since it seemed to imply that each body, being complete in itself, had nothing to gain from or to impart to its surroundings. Rejecting the view that bodies have an intrinsic ‘power’ to affect us and each other as a mere superstition, Malebranche adopted the theory, already proposed by the Cartesians du Cordemoy (c. 16051684) and Arnold Geulincx (1624-1669), of ‘occasionalism’, which he defended with great vigour. This theory—perhaps the first developed account of the concept of causation in modern philosophy—argues that, since the laws of the universe have their origin in God, it is God who produces the events that conform to them. No event produces another of its own nature. Rather, when one thing occurs, then this is the occasion for God’s production of that thing which we know as its ‘effect’. In this view, there is no special difficulty posed by the relation between mind and body, since to speak of interaction between them can only be a manner of speaking: just as it is only a manner of speaking to refer to interaction between anything.
    There is much more to Malebranche’s metaphysics than this theory (often wrongly thought to be, not a general philosophy of causation, but rather an ad hoc apologetic whereby to reconcile the Cartesian theory of mind with the obvious). In particular Malebranche upheld and developed the Cartesian theory of continuous creation; he supported the view that science must be rooted in a priori metaphysical principles; and he reaffirmed the distinction between the rationally conceivable essence and the empirically perceivable properties of things. But his influence in these matters was less great than it might have been. The Cartesian philosophy was already being eclipsed by the more systematic work of Spinoza and Leibniz, and by the powerful attack on rationalism initiated by Hobbes and given magisterial form in Locke’s Essay on the Human Understanding.
    It is impossible to leave the subject of the Cartesian revolution without taking a brief forward glance into that intellectual movement known to the historian of ideas as the ‘Enlightenment’, and known to philosophers either as the eighteenth century, or as nothing at all. By the end of the seventeenth century, scientific knowledge, and the Cartesian clarity of expression, had become universal properties of the educated class; and a new literature began to arise, encyclopaedic in its aims, antiauthoritarian in its preconceptions and outspoken in its style (see especially Pierre Bayle (1647-1706): Dictionnaire historique et critique,