 There is the story that in the same year in which 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 André, reported 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 1886, 11–12). While 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 a stagnant 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.