Introduction

Summary

At Christmas 1686 Malebranche wrote to a correspondent, Pierre Berrand:

I am pressed to compose a metaphysics. I believe that indeed that's very necessary, and that I should have more facility for the task than many people. Good metaphysics must govern everything and I shall try to establish in it the principal truths which are the foundations of religion and ethics. It seems to me that what I shall do will be better than what I have done previously.

Malebranche was surely justified in his confidence that the work he envisaged would be better than anything he had previously written. Although it is less famous and narrower in scope than the earlier Search after Truth, the Dialogues on Metaphysics and on Religion, first published in 1688, is Malebranche's masterpiece; certainly, from a strictly literary point of view it is a far better work than the notoriously rambling Search. But the literary quality of the Dialogues is not the only reason why it provides a more accessible introduction to Malebranche's philosophy than the earlier book; another is the difference in conception between the two works. In The Search after Truth Malebranche is chiefly concerned to analyze the nature and sources of error, and to propose strategies for avoiding it; the Search is to a large extent a treatise on method. By contrast, the Dialogues is a work on metaphysics in the broad sense which includes not only ontology but also the theory of knowledge.