DESCARTES TO BERKELEY Malebranche Nicolas Malebranche, the son of one of Louis XIV’s secretaries, was born in 1638, the year in which Descartes published The Discourse on Method At the age of twenty-six, in 1664, he was ordained a priest of the French Oratory, founded by Descartes’ patron Cardinal Berulle, and in the same year he came across the posthumously published Treatise on Man He was so ravished by this book, his biographer tells us, that he felt ‘such violent palpitations of the heart that he was obliged to leave the book at frequent intervals’ He became the most enthusiastic of all Cartesians, and devoted his life to the pursuit of clear and distinct ideas In 1674–5 Malebranche published his most signiWcant philosophical work, The Search after Truth (De la recherche de la Ve´rite´), and in 1688 he summarized his system in Entretiens sur la Metaphysique Most of his other writings were works of theological controversy, beginning with his Treatise on Nature and Grace of 1680 He fell foul of many of the leading theologians of the age, quarrelling with Arnauld about grace and with Fe´nelon about the right way to love God: his Treatise was placed on the index in 1690 Shortly before his death in 1715 he found himself the target of a posthumously published polemic of John Locke The account of sensation, imagination, intellect, and will presented in Malebranche’s works is essentially the same as that of Descartes The main new item is an explanation of the association of ideas in terms of networks of Wbres in the brain Some of these networks are inborn: from birth, for instance, the brain Wbre corresponding to the idea of a steep cliV is linked to the brain Wbre corresponding to the idea of death Other networks are created by experience: if you attend some historic event, for instance, a brain network will be created linking together ever afterward the persons, times, and places involved (R de V 2.1, 5) Malebranche accepted Cartesian dualism: minds were thinking substances and the essence of matter was extension But he tried to improve upon Descartes’ account of the relationship between mind and body, long recognized as the weakest point in the Cartesian system More consistently than Descartes, Malebranche argued that if mind was pure thought, and matter was pure extension, neither could act upon the other Mind and body run parallel, but not interact ‘It seems to me quite certain that the will of spiritual beings is incapable of moving the smallest body in the world 58