Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: and modern philosophy, which Descartes thought he had definitively interrupted, was renewed in the very first generation that followed him, at the hands of his most illustrious successor. But Malebranche did not make himself a slave to Plato as Scholasticism had been subject to Aristotle. On the contrary, the mixture, or rather blending, of these Platonic elements with the Cartesian principles gave to Male- branche's doctrine an original flavor. The great work on which Malebranche labored for ten years, and which appeared in 1674, was entitled La Recherche de la Vtritt, or The Search for Truth. To begin with, whoever undertakes such a search is to make a careful distinction between rational evidence, the only sign of truth, and the false light of the senses, which, in spite of its apparent clearness, gives but deceitful information. Our senses produce vivid impressions upon us, but do not enlighten us. The light of reason, on the contrary, which seems cold, shows us things as they really are. Therefore, we must close our bodily eyes, and accustom ourselves to see only with our spiritual eyes. This precept is often expressed in language which reminds us of Plato. Socrates, in the Phcedo, represents the body as an element of confusion and darkness, obfuscating the natural clear-sightedness of the soul, which it subjects to gross and deceitful appearances; it restricts the soul to an imperfect reminiscence of the eternal realities, and is, in fact, a sort of prison from which the wise man's soul yearns to be released. Similarly, Malebranche speaks of the tumult of the senses which prevents the soul from hearkening to the voice of reason. He then passes on by imperceptible degrees from the Platonic to the Christian point of view. The soul's subservience to the body becomes a ...