it is necessary that he should perish."(15)

It was as difficult for Father Malebranche to restrain his indignation at
the system of Spinoza, as it was for him to expose its fallacy, after
having admitted its great fundamental principle. This is well illustrated
by the facts stated by M. Saisset: "When Mairan," says he, "still young,
and having a strong passion for the study of the 'Ethique,' requested
Malebranche to guide him in that perilous route; we know with what
urgency, bordering on importunity, he pressed the illustrious father to
show him the weak point of Spinozism, the precise place where the rigour
of the reasoning failed, the _paralogism_ contained in the demonstration.
Malebranche eluded the question, and could not assign the _paralogism_,
after which Mairan so earnestly sought: 'It is not that the paralogism is
in such or such places of the _Ethique_, it is everywhere.' "(16) In this
impatient judgment, Father Malebranche uttered more truth than he could
very well perceive; the paralogism is truly everywhere, because this whole
edifice of words, "this frightful chimera," is really assumed in the
arbitrary definition of the term substance. We might say with equal truth,
that the fallacy of Malebranche's scheme is also everywhere; for although
it stops short of the consequences so sternly deduced by Spinoza, it sets
out from the same distorted view of the sovereignty and dominion of God,
from which those consequences necessarily flow.

Spinoza, who had but few followers during his lifetime, has been almost
idolized by the most celebrated savants of modern Germany. Whether this
will ultimately add to the glory of Spinoza, or detract from that of his
admirers, we shall leave the reader and posterity to determine. In the
mean time, we shall content ourselves with a statement of the fact, in the
language of M. Saisset: "Everything," says he, "appears extraordinary in
Spinoza; his person, his style, his philosophy; but that which is more
strange still, is the destiny of that philosophy among men. Badly known,
despised by the most illustrious of his contemporaries, Spinoza died in
obscurity, and remained buried during a century. All at once his name
reappeared with an extraordinary eclat; his works were read with passion;
a new world was discovered in them, with a horizon unknown to our fathers;
and the god of Spinoza, which the seventeenth century had broken as an
idol, became the god of Lessing, of Goethe, of N