worthless objects to those which have value, and earthly to heavenly pleasure?  The soul is, on the one hand, united to God, on the other, united to the body.  The possibility of error and sin rests on its union with the body, since with the ideas (as representations of the pure understanding) are associated sensuous images, which mingle with and becloud them, and passions with the inclinations (or the will of the soul, in so far as it is pure spirit).  This gives, however, merely the possibility of the immoral, sensuous, God-estranged disposition, which becomes actual only through man’s free act, when he fails to stand the test.  For sin does not consist in having passions, 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, according to his views, the universe is in God, not, as with Spinoza, that God is in the universe; that he teaches creation, 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 decisive, makes God the sole author of motion, i.e., a natural cause.  His attempt at a Christian pantheism was consequently unsuccessful.  But its failure has not shattered the well-grounded fame of its thoughtful author as the second greatest metaphysician of France.