ized by Malebranche that sensation in man
is mixed with thought, that the passions in him are forms of the love
of good in general. But this union of the rational with the sensuous
nature is regarded merely as a confusion which is to be cleared up,
_not_ in a higher unity of the two elements, but simply by the
withdrawal of the spirit from contact with that which darkens and
defiles it. Of a transformation of sense into thought, of passion into
duty--an elevation of the life of sense till it becomes the embodiment
and expression of the life of reason--Malebranche has no conception.
Hence the life of reason turns with him to mysticism in theory and to
asceticism in practice. His universal is abstract and opposed to the
particular; instead of explaining it, it explains it away.

A certain tender beauty as of twilight is spread over the world as we
view it through the eyes of this cloistered philosopher, and we do not
at first see that the softness and ideality of the picture is due to
the gathering darkness. Abstraction seems only to be purifying, and
not destroying, till it has done its perfect work. Malebranche
conceived himself to be presenting to the world only the purest and
most refined expression of Christian ethics and theology. But if we
obey his own continual advice to think clearly and distinctly, if we
divest his system of all the sensuous and imaginative forms in which
he has clothed it, and reduce it to the naked simplicity of its
central thought, what we find is not a God that reveals himself in the
finite, and to the finite, but the absolute substance which has no
revelation, and whose existence is the negation of all but itself.
Thus to tear away the veil, however, there was needed a stronger,
simpler, and freer spirit--a spirit less influenced by opinion, less
inclined to practical compromise, and gifted with a stronger "faith in
the whispers of the lonely muse" of speculation than Malebranche.

_The Philosophy of Spinoza._--It is a remark of Hegel's that Spinoza, as
a Jew, first brought into European thought the idea of an absolute unity
in which the difference of finite and infinite is lost. Some later
writers have gone further, and attempted to show that the main doctrines
by which his philosophy is distinguished from that of Descartes were due
to the direct influences of Jewish writers like Maimonides, Gersonides,
and Hasdai Crescas, rather than