Father Malebranche's Treatise Concerning the Search after Truth: The Whole Work Compleat. To which is added the author's treatise of Nature and Grace. Being a consequence of the principles contain'd in the search.

London: Printed by L. Lichfield, for Thomas Bennet at the Half-Moon, 1694. TAYLOR, T.. . Father Malebranche's Treatise Concerning the Search after Truth. The Whole Work Compleat. To which is added the author's treatise of Nature and Grace. Being a consequence of the principles contain'd in the search. London: Printed by L. Lichfield, for Thomas Bennet at the Half-Moon, 1694.

First edition in English. Folio (12 7/8 x 7 3/4 inches; 327 x 196 mm). [xiv], 172, 10, 203, [1], 42 pp. Eighteenth-century half brown calf over marbled boards, gilt spine lettering. Front joint cracked but still strong. Some browning throughout (especially to signature Ll). Overall, a very good copy.

Malebranche is now recognized as a major figure in the history of philosophy, occupying a crucial place in the Rationalist tradition of Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz. The Search after Truth is his first, longest and most important work. As a leading Cartesian, Malebranche argued in The Search after Truth (1675) and the Dialogues on Metaphysics and on Religion (1688) that our ideas provide no direct, certain knowledge of bodies, but that instead we "see all things in god." This divinely ordained occasionalism provided for the apparent regularity of the natural world without appealing to any genuine causal interaction among things. Malebranche's explanation of the imperfection of a divinely-created universe in the Treatise on Nature and Grace (1680) and other theological writings influenced the theodicy of Leibniz.

Wing M-317.

HBS 66882.

$2,000.