148 DEVELOPMENT OF CARTESIANISM. but in consenting to them. The passion is not caused by the corporeal movement of which it is the sequel, but only occasioned by it ; and the same is true of the movement of the limbs and the decision of the will. The one true cause of all that happens is God. It is he who produces affections in the soul, and motion in the material world. For the body possesses only the capacity of being moved ; and the soul cannot be the cause of the movement, since it would then have to know how it produces the latter. In fact those who lack a medical training have no idea of the muscular and nervous processes involved. Without God we cannot even move the tongue. It is he who raises our arm, even when we use it contrary to his law. Anxious to guard his pantheism from being identified with that of Spinoza, Malebranche points out that, ac- cording to his views, the universe is in God, not, as with Spinoza, that God is in the universe; that he teaches crea- tion, which Spinoza denies; that he distinguishes, which Spinoza had not done, between the world in God (the ideas of things) and the world of created things, and between intelligible and corporeal extension. It may be added that he maintains the freedom of God and of man, which Spinoza rejects, and that he conceives God, who brings everything to pass, not as nature, but as omnipotent will. Nevertheless, as Kuno Fischer has shown, he approaches the naturalism of Spinoza more nearly than he is himself conscious, when he explains finite things as limitations (hence as modes) of the divine existence, posits the will of God in dependence on his wisdom (the uncreated world of ideas), thus limiting it in its omnipotence, and, which is deci- sive, makes God the sole author of motion, i. e., a natural cause. His attempt at a Christian pantheism was conse- quently unsuccessful. But its failure has not shattered the well-grounded fame of its thoughtful author as the second greatest metaphysician of France. Pierre Po iret * (1646-1719; for some years a preacher in
- Poiret : Co^tationts Rationales de Deo, Anima, et Malo, 1677, the later
editions including a vehement attack on the atheism of Spinoza ; L' (Economie Divine, 1682 ; De Eruditione Solida, Super ficiaria, et Falsa, 1692 ; Fides et Ratio CoUaiit, against Locke, 1707.
