mmoral,
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.

Pierre Poiret[1] (1646-1719; for some years a preacher in Hamburg; lived
later in Rhynsburg near Leyden) was rendered hostile to Cartesianism
through the influence of mystical writings (among others those of
Antoinette Bourignon, which he published), and through the perception of
the results to which it had led in Spinoza. All co