NICOLAS, a distinguished philosopher of France, was the son of Nicolas Malebranche, secretary to the French king, and Catherine de Lanzon, sister to the viceroy of Canada, and was born at Paris on the 6th August 1638. Of an extremely feeble constitution and deformed habit of body, he received his elementary education from a domestic tutor, and only left the parental roof when sufficiently advanced to enter upon a course of philosophy at the college of La Marche, and subsequently to study theology at the Sorbonne. He resolved to enter the church; and his retiring and studious disposition having induced him to decline the offer of a canonicate in Notre Dame; he, in 1650, entered the famous Congregation of the Oratoire. Up to the age of twenty-six, Malebranche applied himself painfully to the study of ecclesiastical history and biblical criticism; but as he had no taste for such investigations, his efforts met with little success. Having accidentally fallen upon the *Traité de l'Homme* of Descartes, Malebranche became alive to his true vocation. He was so overpowered by the novelty and luminousness of the ideas, and by the solidity and coherence of the principles of that admirable work, that he was repeatedly compelled, from violent palpitations of the heart, to desist from reading it. Malebranche was from that hour consecrated to philosophy; and after ten years' profound study of the works of Descartes, he produced his celebrated *Recherche de la Vérité*. This work has for its object an inquiry into the faculties of the human understanding, thereby to determine articulate rules for the avoidance of error and the advancement of truth. It contains the germs of all the metaphysical theories developed in Malebranche's subsequent publications, and especially in his *Metaphysical and Christian Meditations*, and his *Discourses on Metaphysics and Religion*. All his works are characterized by originality of conception, elevation of doctrine, and beauty of style; and on their first appearance they met with an extraordinary degree of success. As a writer, Malebranche is placed by the ablest critics side by side with Fénelon; and, singular to say, while vehemently declaiming against the imagination and the study of poetry, there is no writer who has employed that noble faculty with such charming success in giving a grandeur and a glow to the subtlest metaphysical disquisitions, and in lending an attractiveness to the coldest abstractions of the reason. His dialogue between the creature and the Creator, in his *Meditations*, reaches the highest pitch of eloquence and inspiration. Malebranche was less successful in polemics than in pure speculation and in the free expression of his doctrines. He liked better to dogmatize than to discuss; yet after the publication of the *Recherche de la Vérité*, he was dragged, in spite of himself, into a perfect whirlpool of polemics. Like the majority of the great philosophers of the seventeenth century, Malebranche was a mathematician and a natural philosopher; and he was in 1699 chosen an honorary member of the Academy of Sciences. His society was universally courted, and few foreigners of any pretensions to learning neglected, when in Paris, to visit the eloquent philosopher, who had, by his hypothesis of seeing all things in God, offered such an ingenious solution of the harassing problem of external perception. His health, never robust, became daily weaker, until he was at last reduced to a skeleton. He died on the 13th of October 1715, "a tranquil spectator," says Fontenelle, "of this long death." (For a full and detailed critical exposition of the philosophy of Malebranche, see the First Preliminary Dissertation to the present work, p. 74, et seq.)

The following is a list of Malebranche's works:—*Recherche de la Vérité*, 12mo, Paris, 1674. Six successive editions of this work received the author's corrections and additions, and it was translated into Latin, English, and modern Greek. *Conversations Métaphysiques et Chrétien*, 12mo, Paris, 1677; *Traité de la Nature et de la Grace*, Amst., 12mo, 1680; *Meditations Métaphysiques et Chrétien*, 12mo, Cologne, 1683; *Traité de Morale*, 12mo, 1684; *Entretiens sur la Métaphysique et sur la Religion*, 12mo, 1688; *Traité sur l'Amour de Dieu*, 12mo, 1697; *Entretiens d'un Philosophe Chrétien et d'un Philosophe Chinois*, 1708; *Réponses de Malebranche à Arnauld*, 4 vols. 12mo, 1709; *Réflexions sur la Préméditation Physique*, 12mo, 1715. (See L'Eloge de Malebranche, by Fontenelle; *Dictionnaire des Sciences Philosophiques*; and the *Biographie Universelle*.)