Malebranche

This ingenious philosopher and beautiful writer is the only celebrated Cartesian who has professedly handled the theory of Morals. His theory has in some points of view a conformity to the doctrine of Clarke; while in others it has given occasion to his English follower Norris to say, that if the Quakers understood their own opinion of the illumination of all men, they would explain it on the principles of Malebranche. “There is,” says he, “one parent virtue, the universal virtue, the virtue which renders us just and perfect, the virtue which will one day render us happy. It is the only virtue. It is the love of the universal order, as it eternally existed in the Divine Reason, where every created reason contemplates it. This order is composed of practical as well as speculative truth. Reason perceives the moral superiority of one being over another, as immediately as the equality of the radii of the same circle. The relative perfection of beings is that part of the immovable order to which men must conform their minds and their conduct. The love of order is the whole of virtue, and conformity to order constitutes the morality of actions.” It is not difficult to discover, that in spite of the singular skill employed in weaving this web, it answers no other purpose than that of hiding the whole difficulty. The love of universal order, says Malebranche, requires that we should value an animal more than a stone, because it is more valuable; and love God infinitely more than man, because he is infinitely better. But without presupposing the reality of moral distinctions, and the power of moral feelings,—the two points to be proved, how can either of these propositions be evident or even intelligible? To say that a love of the Eternal Order will produce the love and practice of every virtue, is an assertion untenable, unless we take Morality for granted, and useless, if we do. In his work on Morals, all the incidental and secondary remarks are equally well considered and well expressed. The manner in which he applied his principle to the particulars of human duty is excellent. He is perhaps the first philosopher who has precisely laid down and rigidly adhered to the great principle, that Virtue consists in pure intentions and dispositions of mind, without which, actions, however conformable to rules, are not truly moral:—a truth of the highest importance, which, in the theological form, may be said to have been the main principle of the first Protestant Reformers. The ground of piety, according to him, is the conformity of the attributes of God to those moral qualities which we irresistibly love and revere. “Sovereign princes,” says he, “have no right to use their authority without reason. Even God has no such miserable right.” His distinction between a religious society and an established church, and his assertion of the right of the temporal power alone to employ coercion, are worthy of notice, as instances in which a Catholic, at once philosophical and orthodox, could thus speak, not only of the nature of God, but of the rights of the Church.