Malebranche need not occupy us long; indeed, this great philosopher and admirable master of French has to be dealt with by us, at least in some part, because he has been dealt with by others. [Sidenote: _Malebranche._] The invitation to do so, if we may say it without illiberality, seems to have consisted rather in the titles than in the contents of his work. The Second Book of the _Recherche de la Vérité_ is, indeed, “De l’Imagination”; the Second Part of this Second Book has much to do with _les personnes d'étude_; and the Third, Fourth, and Fifth chapters of the Third Part deal with “the imagination of certain authors,” especially Tertullian, Seneca, and Montaigne. But we have seen, and shall see, how treacherous the word Imagination is, and how people will misunderstand it, however frankly they are dealt with. Malebranche, as he always is, is quite frank and quite clear; he tells us definitely that imagination for him is “a little more and a little less than sense,” that it only consists in the power possessed by the soul of forming images of objects for itself. His quarrel with the “persons of study” is that they _will_ read, write, and argue about the ancients, instead of recurring to primary truths; and when he deals with his three selected authors, it is not to criticise them from the literary point of view (though he finds fault with “irregular movements” in Tertullian’s figures), but to object to the paralogism of the _De Pallio_, the ill-regulated imagination and feeble reasoning of Seneca, the treacherous “cavalier” manner, the “criminal attraction born of concupiscence,” the disguised pedantry, the vanity, in Montaigne. Phrases here and there, in his own perfect style[356] (I doubt whether any prose writer of the _grand siècle_ can give points to Malebranche), show what a critic was lost in him; but the critic—as indeed we should expect, and as is quite proper—_is_ lost in the philosopher, the theologian, and the moralist.[357] ----- Footnote 356: As this of the very authors he censures, “Leurs paroles, toutes mortes qu’elles sont, ont plus de vigueur que la raison de certaines gens.” II. 300, Ed. J. Simon, Paris, 1871. Footnote 357: The literary _Pensées_ of Pascal are still fewer, and in dealing with Montaigne he is even further from the literary point of view than Malebranche. His chief utterance is a piece of characteristic scorn at poetical _clichés_ like _bel astre_, _fatal laurier_, &c. ----- And so to Boileau.