That is true; the man who enjoys knows more of it, or at least knows it better, than he who reflects; he is more happy. But what is it that you would have? It depended not, I repeat, upon myself whether I should admit or reject all those ideas which have crowded into my brain in conflict with each other, and actually converted my medullary magazine into their field of battle. After a hard-fought contest between them, I have obtained nothing but uncertainty from the spoils. It is a melancholy thing to possess so many ideas, and yet to have no precise knowledge of the nature of ideas? It is, I admit; but it is much more melancholy, and inexpressibly more foolish, for a man to believe he knows what in fact he does not. But, if you do not positively know what an idea is, if you are ignorant whence ideas come, you at least know by what they come? Yes; just in the same way as the ancient Egyptians, who, without knowing the source of the Nile, knew perfectly well that its waters reached them by its bed. We know perfectly that ideas come to us by the senses; but we never know whence they come. The source of this Nile will never be discovered. If it is certain that all ideas are given by means of the senses, why does the Sorbonne, which has so long adopted this doctrine from Aristotle, condemn it with so much virulence in Helvetius? Because the Sorbonne is composed of theologians. SECTION II. _All in God._ In God we live and move and have our being. --ST. PAUL, Acts xvii, 28. Aratus, who is thus quoted and approved by St. Paul, made this confession of faith, we perceive among the Greeks. The virtuous Cato says the same thing: "_Jupiter est quodcumque vides quocumque moveris_."--Lucan's "_Pharsalia_" ix, 580. "Whate'er we see, whate'er we feel, is Jove." Malebranche is the commentator on Aratus, St. Paul, and Cato. He succeeded, in the first instance, in showing the errors of the senses and imagination; but when he attempted to develop the grand system, that all is in God, all his readers declared the commentary to be more obscure than the text. In short, having plunged into this abyss, his head became bewildered; he held conversations with the Word; he was made acquainted with what the Word had done in other planets; he became, in truth, absolutely mad; a circumstance well calculated to excite apprehension in our own minds, apt as we some of us are to attempt soaring, upon our weak and puny opinions, very far beyond our reach. In order to comprehend the notion of Malebranche, such as he held it while he retained his faculties, we must admit nothing that we do not clearly conceive, and reject what we do not understand. Attempting to explain an obscurity by obscurities, is to act like an idiot.