After the example of Epicurus he was the most sober and austere of men, and
of the two it was Descartes rather than he who was Epicurean in the common
use of the word. According to a tradition, which to my mind rests on
insufficient proof, he was an instructor of Moliere.

All the thinkers of the seventeenth century came more or less profoundly
under the Cartesian influence: Pascal, Bossuet, Fenelon, Arnauld, and all
Port-Royal. This influence was to diminish only in the eighteenth century,
though kept up by the impenitent Fontenelle, but outweighed by that of
Locke, to reappear very vigorously in the nineteenth century in France in
the school of Maine de Biran and of Cousin.

MALEBRANCHE.--A separate niche must be made for the Cartesians,
almost as great as Descartes, who filled the seventeenth century with their
renown,--the Frenchman Malebranche, the Dutchman Spinoza, and the German
Leibnitz. Pushing the theories of Descartes further than Descartes would
himself in all probability have desired to, from what Descartes had said
that it was only _through God_ that we perceived accurately,
Malebranche declared that it was only _in God_ that we perceived
accurately, and fundamentally this is the same idea; it can only be deemed
that Malebranche is the more precise: "God alone is known by Himself [is
believed in without uncertainty]; there is only He that we can see in
immediate and direct perspective." All the rest we see in Him, in His
light, in the light He creates in our minds. When we see, it is that we are
in Him. Evidence is divine light. He is the link of ideas. (And thus
Malebranche brought Plato near to Descartes and showed that, without the
latter being aware of it, they both said the same thing.) God is always the
cause and as He is the cause of all real things, He is cause also of all
truths, and as He is everywhere in real objects, He is also everywhere in
the true ideas which we can have, or rather in which we can participate.