THE PATH OF EVOLUTION 



ment and study led him to join the congregation of 

 the Oratoire. Occupying himself there for some 

 time with ecclesiastical history, with Greek and He- 

 brew literature, he met accidentally with the " Traite 

 des Hommes " of Descartes. He was struck with the 

 new views of science thus opened to him, and read it 

 and the other works of Descartes with so much eager- 

 ness, that he thought he would be able to reproduce 

 them from his own mind if they should ever be lost. 



In 1674 he published his " Recherche de la Verite." 

 The general aim of this work, as well as of others 

 that he published later, was to show the accord of the 

 Philosophy of Descartes with Religion. Descartes 

 had given a far more luminous explanation of the 

 union of the mind and body than any of his pre- 

 decessors. Malebranche expanded Descartes' ideas in 

 regard to the union which we have with the bodies 

 that surround us, and of the mind with God. When 

 investigating the nature of the mind, Malebranche, 

 who believed in the impossibility of a direct com- 

 munication between mind and body, strove to show 

 that the thoughts of the mind cannot be the physical 

 cause of the movement of the body, nor the move- 

 ments of the body the physical cause of the thoughts 

 of the mind, because there are no points of contact 

 between the two substances. All that takes place is 

 in virtue of the general law that God has instituted : 



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