The same year he was ordained, Malebranche happened in a Paris bookstall upon a posthumous edition of Descartes's Traité de l'homme (Treatise on Man), which provides a sketch of a mechanistic account of the physiology of the human body. Malebranche's early biographer, Father Yves M. André, reports that he was so "ecstatic" on reading this account that he experienced "such violent palpitations of the heart that he was obliged to leave his book at frequent intervals, and to interrupt his reading of it in order to breathe more easily" (André 1970, pp. 11–12). Though André does not indicate why Malebranche was so moved, one can speculate that he had discovered in this text a way to investigate the natural world without relying on Aristotelian scholasticism. In any case, after his encounter with L'homme Malebranche devoted himself to a decade-long study of the Cartesian method and its results in mathematics and natural philosophy.
The principal fruit of this study was a two-volume work bearing the title De la recherche de la vérité. Où l'on traitte de la nature de l'esprit de l'homme, et de l'usage qu'il en doit faire pour eviter l'erreur dans les sciences (The Search after Truth, first published 1674–1675), in which is treated the nature of the human mind and the use that must be made of it to avoid error in the sciences.
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