Susan Peppers-Bates-Nicolas Malebranche - Freedom in An Occasionalist World (Continuum Studies in Philosophy) (2009) PDF

Nicolas Malebranche
Continuum Studies in Philosophy

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Role of God in Spinozas Metaphysics, Sherry Deveaux
Rousseau and the Ethics of Virtue, James Delaney
Rousseaus Theory of Freedom, Matthew Simpson
Spinoza and the Stoics, Firmin DeBrabander
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Nicolas Malebranche
Freedom in an Occasionalist World
Susan Peppers-Bates
Continuum International Publishing Group

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Susan Peppers-Bates 2009
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British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: HB: 9781-84706189-8
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Peppers-Bates, Susan.
Nicolas Malebranche : freedom in an occasionalist world / Susan Peppers-Bates.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-1-84706-189-8 (hardback)
ISBN-10: 1-84706-189-3 (hardback)
1. Malebranche, Nicolas, 16381715. I. Title.
B1897.P47 2009
194dc22
Typeset by Newgen Imaging Systems Pvt Ltd, Chennai, India

Printed and bound in Great Britain by the MPG Books Group
2009002044
Contents
Acknowledgments
vii
Malebranches Metaphysics and the Problem of Human Freedom
God, Order, and General Volitions
24
Arnauld and Malebranche on the Power of the Human Intellect
46
The Union of the Divine and the Human Minds
67
Attending to Malebranches Agent Causation
90
Notes
113
Bibliography
137
Index
143
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Acknowledgments
My thanks to Stetson University for granting me a sabbatical leave in fall

2008 so that I could finish this book.
Thank you to The Journal of the History of Philosophy for letting me reprint
my article as chapter four.
My gratitude also goes out to my philosophical colleagues who commented on various drafts of parts or ancestors of this book (thus all
remaining errors are my own): Todd Bates, Stephen T. Davis, Lisa Downing,
Sean Greenberg, Gary Hatfield, John Heil, Marc Hight, Amy Kind, Mark
Kulstad, Charles McCracken, Robert Perkins, James Ross, Joshua Rust, and
Sylvia Walsh.
Thank you to Divina Bungard for excellent clerical support.
For love, support, and sympathy, thank you to my family, Larry, Fran,
Michele and Todd Peppers, Marjorie Maurer, Linda, Hudson and Jennifer
Bates, Jessica Albright, Steve Davis, Kimberly Flinthamilton, John Heil,
Helen Joseph, Sylvia and Bob Perkins, Jim and Glenda Taylor, and my
husband Todd Bates and our daughter Anne-Marie Bates.
To Godin whom we live and move and have our being.
This page intentionally left blank
Chapter 1
Malebranches Metaphysics and the

Problem of Human Freedom
Nicolas Malebranche was born in Paris on August 6, 1638, and died on

October 13, 1715. The years of his birth and death coincide with those of
Louis XIV, the Sun King who brought both glory and war to early modern
France. Nicolas was the last of ten children born to Nicolas Malebranche, a
treasurer for several farms belonging to Richelieu, and Catherine de Louzon,
sister of the French Viceroy to Canada. Malebranche thus came from a wellestablished, noble (several of his uncles were lawyers in service of the Crown)
Catholic family (his mothers relative Madame de Acarie founded the
Carmelite order of nuns in France). The financial stability and piety of his
family allowed this frail, youngest son to pursue his studies. After receiving
his matre s arts from Collge de la Marche, and studying theology for
three years at the Sorbonne, Malebranche entered The Oratory in 1660.
The Oratory was a Roman Catholic order founded in 1611 by Cardinal
Brulle to increase both devotion to the Church and to Augustinianism.
Ordained a priest on September 14, 1664, Malebranche did not inspire
great expectations on the part of his teachers. Pre Andr, his first biographer,
tells us that Malebranches early career was one of mediocrity. Fortunately for
the history of philosophy, Malebranche received his philosophical awakening
via a fortuitous encounter with the writing of Ren Descartes. While perusing
the booksellers on Rue Saint Jacques, Malebranche picked up a copy of Trait
de LHommeand he became so excited by what he read that he had to pause
in his reading to catch his breath. From this moment forward Malebranche
devoured natural and Cartesian philosophy and mathematics: The Search after
Truth (167475) is the first product of a long, prolific philosophical career.1
Malebranches occasionalistic metaphysics, within which only God possesses
true causal power, extends Cartesian doctrines of mechanism, continuous
creation, and substance dualism to emphasize the total dependence of all
creation of a God in whom we live, and move, and have our being.2 Although
this doctrine will become more fully explicit and detailed as his oeuvre
Nicolas Malebranche
progresses, its essence is present in the first chapter of Malebranches first

published work, The Search after Truth, in which he declares: [j]ust as the Author
of nature is universal cause of all motion found in matter, so is He also the general
cause of all natural inclinations found in minds.3
Malebranche is not speaking metaphorically. His occasionalism asserts
that God is literally the moving force of bodies and of wills. Additionally,
his doctrine of the vision in God completes this picture of creaturely
dependence by stressing that the human understanding is totally passive
and relies on God for both sensory and intellectual perceptions. Because
Malebranches occasionalism and his vision in God taken together appear
to account both for creations existence and all of the actions within it, as
well as for the very possibility of knowledge itself, little room seems left
for any kind of true human agency or intellectual or moral freedom; yet
leaving a space for such freedom is something Malebranche clearly wanted
to do. How can genuine human agency be internally consistent with his
metaphysical doctrines of occasionalism and the vision in God? How can
Malebranche reconcile human freedom with divine power?
The full answer to this question will span the length of this book. The key
to the answer comes with a full understanding of two points neglected in
much Malebranche scholarship: (1) the human soul (mind) is made in
the image and for the image of God, i.e. according to Saint Augustine, for
the Truth to which alone it is immediately joined; and (2) God can act
only for Himself, that He can create minds only to know and love Him, and
that He can endow them with no knowledge or love that is not for Him or
that does not tend toward Him.4 The faculties of mind and the freedom
to use them that human beings possess reflect the image of the divine
power. Gods love for His own infinitely perfect being means that because
He created us, He made us to love and to know Him.
These subtle points of Malebranches position, and many of the
fundamental tenets of his ontology that follow are explained in detail and
analyzed in the succeeding chapters of the bookfor now I want to
get the Malebranchean fundamentals out on the table. Accordingly, this
chapter sketches out Malebranches basic metaphysics and introduces the
books general problem space: the aim of the book as a whole is to gain a
detailed philosophical understanding and evaluation of Malebranches
efforts to provide a plausible account of human intellectual and moral
agency in the context of his commitment to an infinitely perfect being
possessing all casual power.
Malebranches relative obscurity in the contemporary Anglo-American
canon is stunning, given his importance and fame in both the seventeenth
Malebranches Metaphysics and Human Freedom
and the eighteenth centuries on the continent.5 As Etienne Gilson correctly

notes:
Malebranche . . . is not to be neglected if the history of modern metaphysics
is to remain intelligible. His doctrine of the indemonstrability of the
existence of the external world, combined with that of vision in God, led
directly to the idealism of Berkeley; his occasionalism, which presupposes
the impossibility of proving any transitive action of one substance on
another, led directly to the criticism directed by Hume against the principle of causality; and we have merely to read Hume to see how conscious
he is of following Malebranche. This was the important moment, perhaps
the decisive moment, in the history of modern philosophy.6
A.A. Luce documents the many lines of relation between Berkeley
and Malebranche in his classic 1934 work Berkeley and Malebranche.7
Charles McCrackens book Malebranche and British Philosophy documents
Malebranches influence on British figures ranging from Norris to Reid.
McCracken brings to light such little known facts as Lockes consideration
of a new chapter to the second edition of the Essay rebutting Malebranches
vision in God and his composition of the Examination of Pre Malebranches
Opinion of Seeing All Things in God.8
As to Malebranches influence on Hume, McCracken notes that:
David Hume urged his friend Michael Ramsay, in preparation for a
reading of Humes just-completed Treatise of Human Nature, to study
Malebranches Search. If Ramsay took Humes advice, he found there the
argument that neither sense nor reason can discover any necessary
connection between the events in nature that we call cause and effect;
that our belief that there is a necessary connection between such events
is a consequence of a custom that habit engenders in us when we
observe events constantly conjoined; that we have no ideas of the self;
that truths consist either of relations of ideas or matter of fact and
existence; and several other doctrines that Ramsay was also to meet
with in Humes book.9
Additionally, Andr Robinet meticulously documents the correspondence
and mutual philosophical influence between Malebranche and Leibniz
(who engages Malebranches ideas directly in both 1686s Discourse on Metaphysics and 1710s Theodicy).10 All of these factsand more could be given
attest to Malebranches importance to the history of modern philosophy;
Nicolas Malebranche
indeed, this brief sketch should serve as a warning to any who claim expertise
of this period of philosophy and yet lack any knowledge of Malebranches
basic doctrines. As this book is a work in philosophy, not intellectual history,
I will not pursue these philosophico-historical relations further. Instead,
I examine and analyze Malebranches unique analyses of causation, sensory
and intellectual perception, and of Gods activity, in search of his solution
to the problem of human freedom in an occasionalist universe.
I. Occasionalism
In The Search After Truth, discussion of occasionalist doctrine does not take
pride of place; indeed, the most thorough discussion of God as true cause
comes in one brief chapter in Book Six attacking the philosophy of the
ancients (presumably the Aristotelians and their scholastic followers, as
will be evident).11 Malebranche attacks the dangerous error of divinizing
bodies by attributing efficacious casual power to them through positing
forms, faculties, qualities, virtues, or real beings capable of producing
certain effects through the force of their nature.12 These pagan substantial forms or natures give bodies divine powers over each other and over the
human minds to which they bring pain or pleasure:
And as love and fear are true adoration, it is also difficult to be persuaded
that we should not adore these beings. Everything that can act upon us as
a true and real cause is necessarily above us, according to Saint Augustine
and according to reason; and according to the same saint and the same
reason, it is an immutable law that inferior things serve superior ones. It
is for these reasons that this great saint recognizes that the body cannot
act upon the soul, and that nothing can be above the soul except God.13
Malebranche claims that if we truly believe bodies cause us pleasure and
pain, thereby rewarding or punishing us, we should worship them, for it is
natural and right to love and fear the true cause of good and evil.14
Malebranche quickly moves to oppose this ancient (and detestable) error
by proving that: [t]here is only one true cause because there is only one
true God; that the nature or power of each thing is nothing but the will of
God; that all natural causes are not true causes but only occasional causes.15
This proof turns on Malebranches claim that only a true cause ensures a
necessary connection between it and its effect. Examining the ideas we have
of body and of mind, says Malebranche, will reveal that all motion or natural
forces in the world simply are the always efficacious will of God. Bodies are
incapable of moving themselves or other bodies; minds are impotent to
move either bodies or themselves to sense or will unless God modifies or
moves them.16
Bodily impacts and human willings are merely occasional causes that
determine the Author of nature to act in such and such a manner in such
and such a situation17 (as exemplified in the laws of motion, the laws of
mind/body union, and the laws governing the union of the mind with
divine Reason). In other words, on the occasion of the impact of two
bodies, God moves them in different directions; and on the occasion of my
willing to move my arm, God moves it; and on the occasion of my attention,
God reveals His ideas to me. The crux here is the argument thatwith
the notable exception of the human minds powers of non-consent and
attention18only God has the power to cause any event; creatures merely
present God with an occasion for acting in accord with the laws of nature
He prescribed at creation. The crucial distinctions between unintelligent
material versus intelligent, free occasional causes will be worked out in
subsequent chapters.
Malebranche argues that because a true cause is only one in which we
perceive a necessary connection between it and its effect, then only God
is or could be a true cause, because the mind perceives a necessary
connection only between the will of an infinitely perfect being and it
effects.19 Malebranche does not elaborate on his reasoning here, probably
because he thinks it is evident when we examine the issue according to
our lights.20 He is not making precisely the same point that David Hume
would later make famous, namely, that we never observe in nature anything
but constant conjunction and so never see necessary connection in the
world. Instead, Malebranche thinks that we arrive at the conclusion that
only God can ensure a necessary connection between cause and effect by
examining the ideas of mind, body, and God, as well as our own experience
of the two former.
When we do carefully consider the ideas of body and of mind, we see that,
as pure extension, body is passive; that mind, although seeming to possess
at least some activity through its will, is still finite and does not have the
power to guarantee that its willings are always carried outagain, only
an infinite power could make such a guarantee. Malebranche adds the
empirical point that we do not observe that our willings are always necessarily followed by bodily motions or the intellectual focus that we desire.
Finally, when we unpack the idea of an infinitely perfect and all-powerful
being, it is evident to our reason that such a beings willings must always
Nicolas Malebranche
be fulfilled. Only in God do we find the necessary link between cause and
effectso only here do we find true causality.21
Malebranche similarly reasons from the idea of God when he notes that
it is a contradiction that He [God] should will and that what He will should
not happen. Therefore, His power is His will.22 Simply put, Gods will is
necessarily efficacious. How could God be called omnipotent if He willed
something and it failed to come to pass? By unpacking the idea of infinitely
perfect being we gain this essential metaphysical truth that God alone is
the true cause. We can speak of God communicating His power to His
creatures because He makes them occasional causes such that when I will to
move my arm, it moves; but, as noted earlier, it is the efficacy of the divine
will that does the true causal work on the occasion of my willing. In short,
it is the Author of our being who executes our will.23
Malebranche claims that faith and reason work together to establish God
as the one true cause:
For if religion teaches us that there is only one true God, this philosophy
shows us that there is only one true cause. If religion teaches us that all
the divinities of paganism are merely stones and metals without life or
motion, this philosophy also reveals to us that all secondary causes, or all
the divinities of philosophy, are merely matter and inefficacious wills.24
This theme of faith and philosophy working together to help us find the
proper path to intellectual and spiritual enlightenment resonates throughout Malebranches worksthough at times he appears to privilege reason
over faith. According to Malebranche, there is only one Truth, expressed in
different voices in religion and philosophy, but ultimately in harmony. Yet if
his system of occasionalism has roots in religious respect for the divine power,
he uses reason both to establish his view and to expound its ramifications.
Indeed, Malebranches use of reason to explain matters of divine conduct
in both the realms of nature and of grace in his Treatise on Nature and Grace
(1680) precipitated the rift with Antoine Arnauld that would span decades
and volumes of writing.25 In Discourse I of this work, Malebranche deduces
the necessity of general laws governing the realms of nature and grace
from the concept of an infinitely perfect being. Adding to his earlier emphasis
of the necessary connection between divine willings and their execution,
Malebranche points out that an infinitely perfect being is able to act only
for His own glory.26 Next, Malebranche argues that since the world is finite,
it is not worthy of the action of Godthus only the mediation of Christ, the
God-man, can make the world worthy of its creator.27
The details behind Malebranches views about why God chose to create
the world, however, are not our main concern.28 Rather, my concern is
Malebranches argument from the idea of God to specific claims about how
God must govern His creation. In considering the relation between God
and the world, according to Malebranche, the focus should be on two
attributes: (1) a wisdom that has no limits; and (2) a power that nothing
is capable of resisting.29 Gods wisdom reveals to Him all possible works
and ways of creating them. His wills are necessarily efficacious: His power is
His will. As such, nothing can resist His action. Such a powerful God does
not need instruments; such a wise God proportions His action to his work:
From this one must conclude that God, discovering in the infinite
treasures of His wisdom an infinity of possible worlds (as the necessary
consequences of the laws of motion which He can establish), determines
Himself to create that world which could have been produced and
preserved by the simplest laws; and which ought to be the most perfect,
with respect to the simplicity of the ways necessary to its production or to
its conservation.30
The simplicity of laws governing the world render honor to God, who
produces an infinity of marvels in the world through a small number of
general volitions.31 Indeed, Malebranche claims that the world can be
produced and preserved through two simple laws of motion: (1) moved
bodies tend to proceed rectilinearly; and (2) upon collision, motion is
distributed between bodies according to their size in such a way that
afterward they move at equal speeds.32
God can create and regulate the world through a small number of
volitions precisely because they are simple and lawful. Malebranche argues
that unlike limited intellects and particular causes, God is an all-wise and
general cause. God foresaw all possible consequences of all possible natural
laws. He did not choose ones that He would overturn: [t]the laws of nature
are constant and immutable; they are general for all times and for all
places.33 Malebranche admits that because of these general laws, evils may
befall humanity. Rain may fall on barren fields and misshapen babies may
be born. Yet God does not will these by particular wills; rather, it is
because He has established laws for the communication of motion, of which
these effects are necessary consequences.34 These same laws are so simple
and fruitful, however, that they also produce everything of beauty in the
world. The generality of Gods will, instantiated in the general laws of
nature, thus serves to apologize for the theological problem of evil and
Nicolas Malebranche
suffering as well as to unpack the philosophical problem of God as true

cause. Malebranche does not just want to justify Gods ways to man; he wants
to explain them, and in so doing, develop his metaphysics and ontology, as
Chapter 2 discusses in depth.
The relationship between the divine, efficacious will and occasional
causes becomes clearer in Malebranches later work Dialogues on Metaphysics
and Religion (1688). Cast in dialogue form, this work plays Malebranches
presumed mouthpiece, Theodore, against his initially nave-sounding pupil
Aristes. (Later things get livened up a bit by the entrance of a third
interlocutor, Theotimus, a brighter pupil of Theodores.) At this point,
Malebranche cashes out his earlier talk of God communicating his power
and of occasional causes determining the general laws, which govern
creation. Again, these general laws are simply the efficacious divine will.
The two key principles behind his argument to establish the inefficacy of
occasional causes are: (1) it is only the creator of bodies who can be their
mover; and (2) God communicates His power to us only through the
establishment of certain general laws, whose efficacy we can determine by
our various modalities.35 To establish the former principle, Theodore
opens Dialogue 7 by reminding Aristes that the only properties possessed
by bodies are based on relations of distance and as such they cannot
possibly act on minds:
I can well understand how bodies, as a consequence of certain natural
laws, can act on our mind in the sense that their modalities determine
the efficacy of the divine volitions or general laws of the union of the
soul and the body, which I shall soon explain. But that bodies should
receive in themselves a certain power, by the efficacy of which they could
act on the mindthis I do not understand. For what would this power
be? Would it be a substance, or a modality? If a substance, then bodies
will not act, but rather this substance in bodies. If this power is a
modality, then there will be a modality in bodies, which will be neither
motion nor figure. Extension will be capable of having modalities other
than distance.36
Theodore treats this reasoning as a reductio ad absurdamfor it is absurd
to think that bodies possess some we-know-not-what modality that gives them
true power. Entities cannot be established from a basis of ignorance. Indeed,
the clear idea of extension reveals that bodies possess only properties based
on relations of distance; and experience fails to teach us that matter truly
has the power to act on our minds.
Theodore is pushing Aristes (and the reader) to acknowledge that the

purported mindbody union philosophers rely on to explain how these two
substances act on each other explains nothing. Union is a confusing term
that itself needs explanation. Indeed, carefully examining the ideas of mind,
body, and God reveals that it is a contradiction for bodies to move themselves
or each otheror indeed for anyone or anything to be the mover but the
creator. Contemplating intelligible extension, the archetype of bodies, reveals
that bodies can be moved but cannot move themselves. Bodies are simply
dumb, extended stuffeven supposing for arguments sake that they could
move, they would not have the intelligence or will needed to decide to move
themselves and the speed and direction to move in. Without intelligence, the
power of self-motion would be useless anyway.37
Further, since it is a contradiction for a (particular) body to exist and yet
be no place or nowhere, even Godthough omnipotentcannot create a
body which is nowhere or which does not have certain relations of distance
to other bodies.38 Yet Gods will gives bodies existence, and they must be
created at rest or in motion (i.e., with particular relations of distance to
other bodies). So in creating them, God must also will their motion or rest.
But creation and conservation are, according to Malebranche, one and the
same volition for God. Unlike a building that endures after the architect
leaves, the moment of creationwhereby creatures come from nothing
into existence and stay thereis never over: because the universe has been
created from nothing, it is so dependent on the universal cause that it would
necessarily relapse into nothingness, were God to cease conserving it.39
Because creation and conservation are but a single volition subsisting and
operating continuously, God can only create a body in a certain place
and it is a contradiction that any finite creature, a body or a mind, be able
to move it out of the place where the divine power has put it.40 Therefore,
only the creator of bodies can be their mover, only His efficacious will can
serve as the motive force of bodies.
This lesson learned, Theodore connects it up with his second crucial
principle, namely that God accommodates His efficacious action to
creatures powerlessness:
God communicates His power to creatures and unites them with one
another, only because He establishes their modalities, occasional causes
of the effects which He produces Himselfoccasional causes, I say, which
determine the efficacy of His volitions as a consequence of the general
laws He has prescribed for Himself, in order to make His conduct bear
the character of His attributes.41
10
Nicolas Malebranche
So we move from a negative discussion of what creatures cannot do to a

positive explanation of what God does do. Reason teaches that only God
can move bodies; experience will reveal what the laws of motion are through
which God manifests His efficacy in the material realm.
The impenetrability of bodies and their impact merely serve as an
occasion for Gods will qua moving force to distribute motion according
to these laws. Likewise, the desires of created minds serve as the occasion
for God to attune His volitions which are always efficacious, to your
desires which are always impotent.42 All creatures are truly united only
to God because they are all powerless and depend only on Him for
their being and their moving force. So this is the true meaning of mind/
body union: it is simply the mutual reciprocity of our modalities
based on the unshakable foundation of divine decrees.43 Deeper discussion of the relationships between mind and body, and mind and divine
Reason, depends upon a discussion of the vision in God. Accordingly,
I will leave the results of divine action in uniting mind and body and turn
to a fuller analysis of how Gods continuously present and efficacious
decrees connect us to the material world around us and to the realm of
ideas beyond us.
II. The Vision in God

The discussion of the passivity of creation and the activity of Gods general
laws does not concern only the case of matter. Free occasional causes or
minds also figure prominently in Malebranches universe: a full account of
their place, however, requires discussion of the vision in God. This doctrine
explains that sensory perception and intellectual apprehension both
depend on contact with an infinite being capable of actually possessing:
(1) the infinite idea of extension presupposed in all sensory awareness; and
(2) the idea of unlimited being presupposed in all intellectual generalization and abstraction in the first place. In the case of sensory perception, the
understanding as a purely passive faculty will be totally determined by God,
as in the case of matter. However, in the case of the union of the mind with
Reason, the will and its attention possess an activity that breaks away from
the analogy with Gods action upon matter.
Therefore, I disagree with Thomas M. Lennons claim that the extension
of Cartesian principles of motion to the realm of psychology was precisely
what Malebranche called for as being the only program consistent with
Gods omnipotence.44 In carefully examining both halves of the vision in
11
God, thenas an explanation of sensory perception and of intellectual

perceptionthe problem space of the book opens up more widely. For the
wills activity, as developed in Malebranches discussion of the union of the
finite and the infinite mind, appears to contradict the doctrine of God as
the one true cause.
The union of the human and divine mind founds all of our knowledge.
The complement to Malebranches occasionalism, the doctrine of the vision
in God, explains human beings dependence on God for both their sensory
and pure intellectual perception. Often misunderstood, Malebranches
doctrine completes his metaphysics of creaturely dependence and divine
omnipotence. While one might be a partial occasionalist without explaining the acquisition of all knowledge as dependent upon Godfor example,
philosophers such as Ren Descartes and Antoine Arnauld who posited an
active will directed toward an individual faculty of pure intellectionfor
Malebranche, the only occasionalism fully consistent with Gods nature
governs the understanding as well.45 Serious consideration of the meaning
of God qua infinitely perfect being determines not merely that He possesses
all causal power, but also how He must use this power: in accordance with
the order of His perfections. Considerations of order will determine that
only the vision in God is worthy of God and honors His simple yet fruitful
ways of acting. As Malebranche declares at the close of his chapter on the
vision of God:
Let us hold the view, then, that God is the intelligible world or the place
of minds, as the material world is the place of bodies; that from His power
minds receive their modifications; that in His wisdom they find all their
ideas; that through His love they receive their orderly impulses, and
because His power and love are but Himself, let us believe with Saint
Paul, that He is not far from any of us, and that in Him we live and move
and have our being.46
Exploring this idea that God is the minds place, and how this shapes
Malebranches account of sensory versus intellectual perception, will be key
to understanding the ultimate boundaries Malebranche grants to human
freedom.
In order to understand the vision in God, we must take seriously the
implications of Malebranches claim that the only purely intelligible
substance is Gods, that nothing can be revealed with clarity except in
the light of this substance.47 Only that which can act upon us, thereby
modifying us, can enlighten us: intelligibility depends upon active power.
12
Nicolas Malebranche
Further, Malebranche accepts the Augustinian stricture that the lower

cannot affect the higher; thus nothing can act immediately upon the
mind unless it is superior to it (bodies are lower than our minds; other
minds are merely equal to ours).48 Only God is the kind of thing so to
speak that can act on creaturesremember the Malebranchian dictum that
only the creator of bodies can be their mover.
Even though it is essential to remember that soul and body cannot interact
because extended body cannot have any relation to unextended soul, this
is not the primary motivation for explaining sensory perception via ideas in
God. For other intelligences, such as human or angelic minds, cannot
directly act on human minds or bodies either, due to the strictures of
Malebranches strict occasionalism. All of these are merely occasional
causes. If the only purely intelligible substance is Gods, then of course we
can only see bodies or ideas in His substance. There is a tighter connection
between Malebranches occasionalism and his vision in God than is commonly thought.
Unfortunately, Malebranche confuses matters by opening his chapter on
the nature of ideas with his infamous walking mind argument: this
argument seems to suggest that we cannot perceive objects external to us
directly (or by themselves) because the soul does not stroll about the
heavens to see the sun. Malebranche argues that the minds immediate
object here must be something intimately joined to our soul.49 Reading
with the principle of philosophical charity, it is highly doubtful Malebranche
means that the soul literally needs to be spatially present to the objects of
human vision, that it must go gallivanting around and touch objects to
see them. Rather, Malebranche is making an ontological point about what
is capable of having relation with or affecting the human soul. For the
soul cannot even see its own body, which surely is near to it if anything
material is.
Building upon his claim that only God can have a true union with and act
upon human minds, Malebranche is emphasizing that only ideasnot
bodiescan act upon the mind (since it will turn out that ideas just are
Gods always efficacious substance, the collection of perfections that are
His essence,50 this is to say that only God can act on minds, give them
perceptions and modifications, reveal ideas to them). Malebranche defines
idea as the immediate object, or the object closest to the mind, when it
perceives something, i.e. that which affects and modifies the mind with the
perception it has of the object.51 Malebranche supports this point with
(what contemporary theorists call) the problem of illusion: since we can
perceive things that do not existsuch as dancing pink elephants or water
13
in the desertit is necessary that something be present to the mind in such

cases: indeed, in cases of perceptual error the mind sees a really existent
idea. (Of course, this does not prove that in all cases of sensory perception
we see an idea and not a body; but the fact that this theory can account for
this problem does add to its viability.) Ideas, according to Malebranche,
have a real existence and real properties; for everyone, he claims, will agree
that the idea of a square is different from the idea of a circle, and so they
represent different things.
Malebranche believes that everyone will agree with him that material things
cannot be seen directly and must be represented by ideas (or some kind of
representational intermediary), so he turns to a reductio/classification of the
different ways in which this might occur. Examining these alternatives
shows the positions Malebranche took as philosophical competitors.
He first ridicules a caricature of the Peripatetic view that external
objects transmit species that resemble them, and that these species are
carried to the common sense by the external senses, material species that
are changed into intelligible ones by the agent intellect and passed on to
the passive intellect.52 Malebranche focuses on attacking the idea that
objects transmit resembling species, throwing out an amalgam of arguments: (1) that since objects can only transmit species of their same
nature, they must send forth little impenetrable bodies that crash into
each other and fill up all the earth and the heavens. But this is ridiculous,
objects could not be made visible this way. (2) Plus, as an object comes
closer or moves further away, the species must grow and shrink and then
we cannot understand how this occurs or where the new parts come from
or the old parts go to when the species change size. (3) Since pictures or
ovals or parallelograms make us see circles and squares, objects need not
send out resembling species for us to see them. And (4) if bodies kept
sending out little material species, why dont they sensibly diminish in
size?53 With these argumentsand his earlier discussion in book one of
the errors of the sensesMalebranche believes that he has dispatched the
Peripatetics and quickly moves on.54
Next Malebranche attacks the view (possibly pseudo-Cartesian55) that
souls have the power to produce both the ideas of things they wish to think
about and ideas that correlate with our bodily impression, even though
these are not resembling images. Malebranches main concern here is the
power this grants to humans to create and destroy ideas as they desire.
For since ideas are real spiritual beings and humans do not have the power
of being causes and producers, the soul cannot produce its own ideas.
Further, given the difference between mind and body, if the soul could
14
Nicolas Malebranche
create its own ideas from material impressions, it would be performing a

feat perhaps even more difficult than creation from nothing:
It is even more difficult to produce an angel from a stone than to produce
it from nothing, because to make an angel from a stone (insofar as it can
be done), the stone must first be annihilated and then the angel must be
created, whereas simply creating an angel does not require anything
to be annihilated. If, then, the mind produces its own ideas from the
material impressions the brain receives from objects, it continuously does
the same thing, or something as difficult, or even more difficult, as if it
created them. Since ideas are spiritual, they cannot be produced from
material images in the brain, with which they are incommensurable.56
A human soul does not possess the power of creation and annihilation of
ideas that Malebranche claims this view requires.
He argues further that even if humans did possess this power, they could
not use itfor as a painter cannot paint a picture of an object he has never
seen, a human could not form the idea of an object unless he already
knew it, unless he already had the idea of it, which idea does not depend
on his will; and then the new idea would be redundant.57 The pure
intellectual idea of a square, for example, is the model for our imagining
and sensing it, says Malebranche (hinting at the forthcoming doctrine
of the vision in God). In essence, Malebranche argues that without an
archetype or model already present, we would never be able to conceive of
any idea in the first place.
For similar reasons, Malebranche attacks the theory of mind as a storehouse of ideas created within us. Given the fact that God always acts in the
simplest manner, He would not create the mind with the infinity of ideas
needed just to know the different kinds of ellipses. He certainly would not
complicate things further and create the mind with the infinitely infinite
number of ideas needed to know the rest of geometrical figures or other
creatures. Yet even if he did this, the soul would not be able to choose which
idea to pick out to serve as a representational proxy on any given occasion
when it wanted to perceive an object. As Malebranche argues:
Through this means it could not even perceive a single object such as the
sun when it is before the bodys eyes. For, since the image the sun imprints
on the brain does not resemble the idea we have of it (as we have proved
elsewhere), and as the soul does not perceive the motion the sun produces
in the brain and in the fundus of the eyes, it is inconceivable that it should
15
be able to determine precisely which among the infinite number of its

ideas it would have to represent to itself in order to imagine or see the
sun and to see it as having a given size. It cannot be said, then, that ideas
of things are created with us, or that this suffices for us to see the objects
surrounding us.58
The souls limited power and knowledge, then, prevents it from being able
to pick out which idea can serve to represent an object: and, as we saw in his
earlier argument, Malebranche believes that the soul could not form an
idea of an object unless it already had that idea/archetype before it.
Indeed, Malebranche foreshadows his own doctrine by commenting that
we must always have in us the ideas of all things (albeit in a confused manner) or we could never think about anything: for after all, one cannot will
to think about objects of which one has no idea.59 If we consider the object
of our thought when we think of infinity or indeterminate being, we will
quickly see that such an idea could not have been created with us, [f]or no
created reality can be either infinite or even general, as is what we perceive
in these cases.60 So the simplicity of Gods ways rules out the infinite storehouse model, as does our own souls inability to select from among such
ideas, and so also does the very nature of certain ideas as greater than any
created reality.
The final view Malebranche attacks would have the soul see the essence
and/or existence of objects by contemplating its own perfections. In other
words, could the ideas representing external things really be just modifications of the soul such that the mind could turn within to represent the
external world to itself? Proponents of this kind of view might argue that
the soul possesses the perfections of lower things, like body, eminently
and as such is like an intelligible world, which contains in itself all that
the material and sensible world contains, and indeed, infinitely more.61
Malebranche presses heavily here on his claim that no created being
possesses the infinite reality needed to contain the perfections of all
beingsto see nothing is not to seeso we cannot see more reality than
we can actually contain.62 Malebranche attacks this view as rash and due
to natural vanity, a hubris-based love of independence that makes us
want to be like God who does contain all beings.63 Quoting one of his
favorite Augustinian dictums, Malebranche warns that we must not think
we are lights unto ourselves, for only God is a light unto Himself and can
see all that He has produced and might produce by considering Himself.64
As Malebranche explains, before creation God had ideas of the world that
He used as the archetypes for His production; His ideas of the world are in
16
Nicolas Malebranche
Him and He can see within Himself all beings by considering His own
perfections, which represent them to Him.65 No merely finite mind could
contain ideas infinite in number and character (see later).
Further, because the world and its creatures depend on Gods will for
their creation, and He obviously knows what He wills, He knows their
existence perfectly.66 In contrast, human minds cannot turn to their own
modifications to see the essence or existence of other creatures, for they
are too limited to contain all beings as does God. Neither do all beings
depend on the human will for their existence. So the mind does not know
the essence of or see the existence of things through itself, but rather it
depends on something else for this.67 This something else is God.
For Malebranche, then, the only answer that satisfies reason and religion
is the doctrine of the vision in God. Considering God qua creator reveals
that He must possess the ideas of His creation, as He used them as
production guides and He sees them through their relation to his various
perfections; religion and philosophy tell us that God, the continuous
creator of our being, is intimately close to us, such that He might be said
to be the place of minds as space is, in a sense, the place of bodies.68 Taking
these two premises together, says Malebranche, entails the conclusion that
we can see all things in God:
Given these two things, the mind surely can see what in God represents
created beings, since what in God represents created beings is very
spiritual, intelligible, and present to the mind. Thus, the mind can see
Gods works in Him, provided that God wills to reveal it to what in Him
represents them.69
So rather than creating an infinite number of innate ideas, or trying to
claim that finite minds can contain infinite representations, or letting the
soul possess the power of creation, or having bodies send out material
species, Malebranche argues that we perceive external bodies as well as
having pure intellectual perceptions through contact with eternal,
immutable ideas contained in the divine being. The other alternatives
fail for Malebranche, due to internal contradictions with the wisdom and
simplicity of Gods ways.
In contrast, Malebranche believes that the vision in God conforms to
reason and to the economy with which Gods laws govern the realm of
nature. Gods power and wisdom are shown by doing greater things with
very simple and straightforward means, as in Gods creation of the material world and all its creatures from extension alone.70 Because God can
17
allow human minds to see everything by revealing what in Him is related

to and represents these things, there is no likelihood that He does
otherwise.71 Malebranches argument by elimination has taken ideas out of
the Cartesian mind and transported them to Gods; in so doing, he has
shifted ideas to a different ontological plane and made a radical break with
Cartesian metaphysics.
Malebranche warns that humans ought not to get delusions of
grandeurhis doctrine does not posit that we see Gods absolute essence
in this life, but only that we see in Gods substance what is relative to creatures and the extent to which they participate in the divine perfections.
Finite beings are limited and imperfect and so can only see the imperfect
and not the infinitely perfect being. The vision in God does not exalt human
power but appears to undermine it. This doctrine satisfies Malebranche
because it conforms with his occasionalism and his religious devotion by
making humans even more dependent upon God than did Descartes or
the Scholastic Aristotelians. Gods total causal power extends not only as a
link between bodily motions and between our desires and bodily motions,
but also connects our minds to their visual and intellectual worlds. As
Malebranche puts this point:
The second reason for thinking that we see beings because God wills that
what in Him representing them should be revealed to us . . . is that this
view places created minds in a position of complete dependence on
Godthe most complete there can be. For on this view, not only could
we see nothing but what He wills that we see, but we could see nothing
but what He makes us see . . . He is truly the minds light and the father
of lights.72
Indeed, as Malebranche noted in his criticism of other views, the mind can
only desire to see something, or call forth an idea, if it has already seen
italbeit only in a confused and general fashion. How could it desire or
picture something it has never known or contacted? Malebranche asserts
that because it is a fact that we can desire to see all beings, we must always
already be in contact with them: this could only be the case if all beings are
present to us because God is present to us and He contains all beings.
Malebranche argues that unless God were present to us in this intimate
way, we would not even be capable of abstract thought: [I]t even seems
that the mind would be incapable of representing universal ideas of genus,
species, and so on, to itself had it not seen all beings contained in one.73
Malebranche rejects the idea that we can deduce general natures, such as
18
Nicolas Malebranche
the nature of a triangle, from experience of particular beings; for no matter

how many triangles I see, this confused amalgam can in no way represent
the infinite possible number of triangles. Rather, when we see the essence
of a triangle, it is not a created particular essence (which does not possess
enough reality to perform this function) but a universal, general, eternal
idea.74 As Malebranche clarifies this point in the Tenth Elucidation (on the
nature of ideas):
But the soul, however it might sense itself, does not know either itself or
its modifications, the soul which is a particular being, a very limited and
imperfect being. Certainly it cannot see in itself what is not there in any
way at all. How could we see in one species of being all species of being,
or in a finite and particular being a triangle in general, while it is a
contradiction that the soul should be able to have a modification in
general. The sensations of color that the soul ascribes to figures make
them particular, because no modification of a particular being can be
general.75
The very fact that the mind perceivesthough without comprehending
the infinite proves both that God exists and that He reveals this idea to us,
according to Malebranche. Here he is reasoning from the commonly
accepted fact (at least by Descartes et al.) that we do have a limited grasp of
the idea of the infinite.
For Malebranche, however, a finite mind does not have enough reality
to create or possess this idea as one of its modifications and so the fact
that we see it proves that the infinite exists outside us. In The Dialogues,
Malebranches spokesman Theodore will make this point succinctly by
stating that the modifications of beings cannot extend beyond those beings
themselves, because the modifications of beings are simply those same
beings existing in a particular way. My mind cannot measure this idea, for it
is finite, and the idea is infinite.76 The mind cannot fully comprehend the
infinitebut by examining it the mind realizes that it can never exhaust it,
not because it fails to see the infinites limit, but rather because it (the
mind) sees clearly that it (the infinite) has none.77
Further, the idea of the infinite we see proves Gods existence and the
vision in God, for the human mind has a very distinct idea of God, which
it can have only by means of its union with Him, since it is inconceivable
that the idea of an infinitely perfect being (which is what we have of God)
should be something created.78 To see the infinite is to believe in God as
our true light, for there is no other rational and satisfactory explanation for
19
this phenomenon, according to Malebranche. As finite creatures cannot

even grasp or contain the idea of infinite extension, they certainly do not
possess enough reality to contain the idea of God, The Infinite. So if our
ability to have the idea of infinite extension proves that God exists, our
ability to see the idea of an infinitely perfect being does so all the more:
Certainly, by infinite intelligible extension you see that God exists. For it
is only He who contains what you see, because nothing finite can contain
an infinite reality . . . Note, however, when I think of being and not of
particular beings, when I think of the infinite and not of a particular
infinite, it is certain, in the first place, that I do not see so vast a reality in
the modifications of my mind. For if I cannot find sufficient reality
in them to represent the infinite in extension, that is all the more reason
why I shall not find enough there to represent the infinite in all ways.
Thus it is only God, the infinite indeterminate being, or the infinitely
infinite infinite, who can contain the infinitely infinite reality I see when
I think of being, and not of particular beings or particular infinites.79
This idea of the infinite even comes before and permits our conception of
the finite. Malebranche says that we conceive of infinite being when we first
think of being, for we do not yet think of it as finite or infinite.
In order to for us to first think of and recognize something finite,
however, we must first have access to this more general being that contains
them (and that we can then pare down by honing in on particular portions
of it, so to speak):
Thus, the mind perceives nothing except in the idea it has of the infinite,
and far from this idea being formed from the confused collection of all
our ideas of particular beings (as philosophers think), all these particular
ideas are in fact but participations in the general idea of the infinite; just
as God does not draw His being from creatures, while every creature is
but an imperfect participation in the divine being.80
The vision in God of the idea of the infinite, of being without restrictions,
is a condition for our intellectual perception of any particular being. As
David Scott explains this, Malebranche is focusing on a problem as old as
Platos Meno: the conceptual problem about the very possibility of cognition in the first place . . . Malebranche claims that the minds ability to
understand and relate things to itself depends on some sort of cognitive
backdrop against which particular things can be identified.81 The vision in
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Nicolas Malebranche
God makes possible our inhabitation of a meaningful universe; it allows us

not merely to see but to see that.82 We depend on God not just for sensory
perception of particular objects, but for the intellectual perception of their
particular concepts as well.
Again, we should remember that occasionalism is constraining the kind
of explanation Malebranche could accept in the first place. Only God can
act on creatures. The ideas or eternal perfections that exist in His total
simplicity are efficacious on our minds, so to speakthese efficacious
ideas (see Chapter 4) illumine the mind and bring it knowledge and
perception. Because only what is superior to mind can act upon it, only the
creator of minds can move or modify them. In addition, God must act in us
according to the love He bears for Himself and His attributes, for God can
have no other special end for His actions than Himself.83
Indeed, Malebranche argues in the preface to The Search that what God
madeespecially human minds and heartsHe made for Himself and so
they must tend toward Him.84 Accordingly, God made human hearts to love
and move toward Him; He also made human minds to gain through the
light. He gives them some knowledge of Himself, to know God through
knowing His creation. So we not only see all things in God, but, in doing so,
we see God in an imperfect way (not in His essence):
Thus, as we love something only through our necessary love for God, we
see something only through our natural knowledge of God; and all our
particular ideas of creatures are but limitations of the idea of the Creator,
as all the impulses of the will toward creatures are only determination of
its impulse toward the creator.85
We do not only see eternal, necessary ideas (and the relations of equality
and inequality among them, i.e., truth) in God, however. We also see
changing, corrupt, finite creatures by seeing what in God is related to them.
For example, when we see a table, it is through and in relation to the infinite
ideas of extension in God that this perception is possible.
On Malebranches account, sensory perception is made up of two
elements: a pure idea and a sensation. The sensation is merely a modification of our soul caused by God, such as the sensation of color. The idea
is in God, and we see it because it pleases God to reveal it to us.86
Sensation particularizes and colors the idea, so to speak; by affecting us
it delimits the idea and makes us believe that an object is present. As
Malebranche clarifies in the tenth elucidation, we should not jump to
the conclusion that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the
21
material and intelligible world, as if my computer has a mirror-intelligible

matching object:
Thus, when I said that we see different bodies through the knowledge we
have of Gods perfections that represent them, I did not exactly mean
that there are in God certain particular ideas that represent each body
individually and that we see such an idea when we see the body; for we
certainly could not see this body as sometimes great, sometimes small,
sometimes round, sometimes square, if we saw it through a particular
idea that would always be the same [because God is immutable]. But I do
say that we see all things in God through the efficacy of His substance,
and particularly sensible things, through Gods applying intelligible
extension to our mind to a thousand different ways, and that thus intelligible extension contains all the perfections, or rather, all the differences
of bodies due to different sensations that the soul projects on the ideas
affecting it upon the occasion of these same bodies.87
Depending on which sensations God gives us, different parts of infinite
intelligible extension will become particularized and represent to us
different material objects. Minds also see in God the eternal (moral) laws,
like the golden rule or that minds are to be valued over bodies. God
impresses motion on our will to lead us to Him and the immutable order
of His perfections that is His law. As will be discussed in Chapters 4 and 5, if
we freely follow this order, God will be entirely in us, and we in Him in a way
much more perfect than that by which we must be in Him and He in us that
we might subsist.88 So our souls depend totally on God for enlightenment
according to the union He established between their will and Gods revealing ideas to them, as they totally depend on God for the pleasures and pain
coming from the union He established between our souls and our bodies.
Still, the vision in God, as presented in The Search After Truth, emphasizes
the doctrine as an explanation of sense perception. Further, humans are
presented as having no control over the pleasures or pains they suffer; God
reveals the idea and gives humans the modifications needed for them to
have an experience of external objects (including of their own bodies
insofar as they are external, in a sense, to the soul). Malebranche hints that
the doctrine is intended to explain more when he mentions the union
between our minds and the WordGod qua Divine Reasonand when he
adds that through our free action we can come to exist more fully in God.
These glimpses of the vision in God as a means of explaining the union of
our mind with divine Reason are developed in The Dialogues on Metaphysics
22
Nicolas Malebranche
and Religion, where Malebranche places additional emphasis on the extent

to which it is up to us to earn our enlightenment.
According to Malebranche, we must silence our senses, imagination,
and passions and listen to the voice of Gods wisdom within us: Reason
constantly speaks to it [your mind] but, since you lack attention, you do not
sufficiently hear what it tells you.89 Malebranche, through the character of
Theodore, constantly chastises both Aristes and his readers to let the light
of Reason guide the minds judgments and the hearts love.90 Attention is
the occasional cause of our enlightenment, and our desires and love determine what we will focus on and the goods we will pursue. Malebranches
insistence that we must learn to heighten our attention and to restrain the
judgment of which desires are worthy shows that he is assuming that as
minds, humans possess freedom and the power to determine their action.
So unlike the totally passive material body, whose impact is the occasion for
movement but has no influence upon anything causing that impact, humans
do have some influence over the occasional cause of their enlightenment.
Malebranche flatly states that we are free to follow the light of reason
or to walk in the darkness by the false and deceiving glimmer of our
modalities.91 Those who meditate on the nature of mind, matter, and God
should be well aware that only God can act on us, that He gives us
sensations merely so that we know what is happening in our bodies and the
relations of other bodies to it, but not to know the essences or ideas of
things. To gain true knowledge we must consult divine reason and consider
the intelligible ideas it contains. Our sensation of heat protects our body by
moving it away from fire; we err if we jump to the conclusion that heat
is really a quality of the fire. If however, we consult the idea of infinite
extension, we will see that extensionwhich is the essence of bodiescan
only possess relations of figure and distance. Our decision to think about
the essence of bodies is under our control in a way that our sensory experience of them simply is not:
The disturbances excited in my brain are the occasional or natural cause
of my sensations. But the occasional cause of the presence of ideas to my
mind is my attention. I think about what I will. It is up to me to examine the
subject that we are speaking about, or any other. But it is not up to me to feel
pleasure, to hear music, to see one particular color alone.92
If we were not able to focus our attention, we would be like the inert
Cartesian matter, completely determined and moved by Gods laws of
nature, and both the material and the spiritual universe would be completely
23
mechanized. Malebranche, however, wants to preserve human freedom,

intellectual and moral, for the sake of both philosophy and religion. As I
stated at the outset, Malebranche was too wed to Cartesian thought to totally
abandon the concept of a faculty of pure intellect; and he is too religiously
devout to forsake the freedom needed for moral accountability (even while
apparently granting God total causal power). This book examines how
Malebranche attempted to carve out a space for human intellectual freedom, especially over the determination of our attention, and how human
agency fits into his occasionalist metaphysics. This chapter has laid the
groundwork needed to understand Malebranches basic ontology and the
problem of freedom it generates. The next chapter analyzes in more detail
how Gods wisdom (order) determines His manner of acting and the
implications of this view for Malebranches metaphysics. Chapter 3 uses the
infamous ArnauldMalebranche debate over ideas to delve deeper into
the nature and function of his doctrine of the vision in God. Chapter 4
shows how Malebranches development of the ontology of the divine ideas
and their relationship to the human mind sharpened his conception of the
human minds knowing powers and the wills immanent power. Chapter 5
brings all of these discussions to bear on the minds power of immanent
causation and his considered account of the role and scope of human moral
and intellectual freedom.
Chapter 2
Having laid out Malebranches general metaphysical picture in Chapter 1,

this chapter turns to an in-depth analysis of his explanation of God qua
divine Reason and the order He imposes on Himself to govern His
own activity. As discussion of the doctrines of the vision in God and occasionalism made clear, Malebranche embraces a thoroughly theocentric
metaphysics. His God does not, like Descartes, vindicate the faculty of
human intellect, then fade from view. Malebranches God is present at
every instant of creation, is the sole causal agent in the universe, and the
one who enlightens the human mind and moves the human will. Thus,
before turning to the main problem of the bookthe puzzle of free human
agency within such a God-centered and controlled universeGods own
activity must first be further analyzed.
According to Malebranche, order is the rule of Gods will, and the
essential limit that He places on Himself. In willing, God submits Himself
to the immutable and necessary relations between His perfections or attributes that is His law (see later). God must always act in a way that bears the
character of these attributes. Thus, for Malebranche, serious consideration
of the meaning of God qua infinitely perfect being determines not merely
that He possesses all causal power, but also how He must use this power: in
a simple, constant, fruitful manner worthy of His perfections. Further,
because Gods wisdom or Reason is consubstantial with Him, God finds
all truths and perfections within Himself. As will be discussed in this
chapter, the apparently paradoxical notion of God constraining or limiting Himselfof submitting His power to His wisdomis essential to
understanding the order that governs both the divine and human intellects. Gaining a deeper understanding of the divine reason leads to a
deeper understanding of how God must act in the world according to
general volitions. This analysis of God and the divine order, then, will also
illuminate Malebranches theodicy: his explanation and justification of
sin, error, and evil in the world.
25
I. God and Order

God, the infinitely perfect being, possesses all absolute realities or all
perfections, without any of the limitations or imperfections of created
beings: He possesses all of these perfections while remaining perfectly
simple, as He is Being without restriction.1 As God contains no restrictions, His perfections contain no limitations. Each of His perfections does
not conflict with, but rather contains all the others.2 Each perfection that
He [God] possesses contains all the others without any real distinction:
because as each perfection is infinite, it is all the divine Being.3 Gods
attribute of justice, for example, does not prevent Him from possessing
the attribute of wisdom, in the way that matters possessing the attribute of
triangularity rules out its possessing the attribute of squareness. Unlike
finite thinkers, God does not have to think successively; each of His thoughts
does not contain, as it does in you, the negation of all the others.4
God not only has ideas of all things, but also has ideas of all the infinity of
their relations (actual and possible). Malebranche categorizes the kinds of
relation we can see in Gods wisdom into relations of magnitude (speculative truths) and of perfection (practical truths). Relations of magnitude
deal with quantity, things such as mathematical facts: [t]wo times two are
four: this is a relation of equality in magnitude, it is a speculative truth
which excites no movement in the soul, neither love nor hate, neither
esteem nor contempt, whose evidence require[s] only judgment.5 The
truths of mathematics, relations of quantity, of more and less, are eternal
truths, relations that we can grasp as clearly and distinctly as does God
Himself. Relations of perfection, on the other hand, we see more confusedly. Unlike quantitative relations, these relations incite us not only to
judgment but also excite movement: the relation of inequality in perfection between a man and a horse leads us to judge that the former is more
valuable than the latter.6 These kinds of relation are called practical because
they bear upon our conduct, on what we should esteem and value.
Malebranche asserts in The Treatise on Ethics:
From this it is obvious that Truth, Falsehood, Justice, and Injustice are real
and exist for all intelligent beings; that what is true for man is also true for
an angel, and for God Himself. What is injustice or disorder for man is
also such for God Himself. This is because all minds, when contemplating
the same intelligible substance, necessarily find therein the same relations of magnitude or the same speculative truths. They also discover
therein the same practical truths, the same laws, the same order, when
26
Nicolas Malebranche
they see the relations of perfection existing between the intelligible beings
contained in this same substance of the Word the substance which alone
is the immediate object of all our knowledge.7
Malebranche is pointing out one of the important consequences of the
doctrine of the vision in God: since we literally see ideas (and via them the
creatures they represent) in the mind of God, we see the same relations of
ideas, the same truths and perfections that God Himself sees. The limited
human intellect could never see as God seesbut we can see the same
objects that He does (even if we do not see them fully).
Malebranche does not think that the finite mind could fully comprehend
the abyss of infinite relations among the infinite ideas and perfections
that make up the divine mind and its motivations. Still, he supposes that
we can give a rational analysis of God qua infinitely perfect being and
thereby deduce the kinds of actions that would honor or would contradict
the nature of God. As Theodore reassures his pupils as the start of
Dialogue 8, we shall never be deceived provided we attribute to God only
what we clearly and distinctly see belongs to the infinitely perfect Being,
only what we discover not in an idea distinguished from God, but in His
very substance.8
Thus Malebranche thinks that we are justified in making these kinds of
speculation because we arein the vision in Godactually in contact with
the very substance of God. Malebranche firmly declares:
it seems to me that the principle that only God enlightens us, and that He
enlightens us only through the manifestation of an immutable and necessary wisdom or reason so conforms to religion, and furthermore, that this
principle is so absolutely necessary if a sound and unshakable foundation
is to be given to any truth whatsoever, that I feel myself under an indispensable obligation to explain and defend it as much as I possibly can.9
While commentators have duly noted Malebranches break with Descartes
in removing ideas from the human to the divine mind, however, less emphasis has been placed on Malebranches further break from Descartes in making Reason consubstantial with Godthus according to Malebranche
objective truth exists not only because our clear and distinct perceptions
are of divine archetypes, but also precisely because those ideas exist in an
immutable and necessary wisdom.10
The order of perfections and relations of magnitude that make up the
truths or real relations in God exist eternally in God; but God does not
27
make them. They make up the Reason that is consubstantial with

God: these truths are Gods eternal wisdom. So Malebranche firmly
rejects Descartes belief in the free creation by God of the eternal truths.
As Descartes explains this doctrine in the Sixth Set of Replies to his
Meditations on First Philosophy:
It is self-contradictory to suppose that the will of God was not indifferent
from eternity with respect to everything which has happened or will ever
happen; for it is impossible to imagine that anything is thought of in
the divine intellect as good or true, or worthy of belief or action or
omission, prior to the decision of the divine will to make it so . . . it is
because he willed that the three angles of a triangle should necessarily
equal two right angles that this is true and cannot be otherwise; and so on
in other cases.11
Yet this conception of a God whose will determines what is good and the
very truths of mathematics opens the door to even greater worries. Fears
that the senses may always trick us, that in any situation what we sense may
be as unreliable as it is in dreams, motivated Descartes famous skeptical
worries. He resolved them through the discovery of an omnibenevolent
God who gave us our faculty of reason to protect us from error. However, if
this God also determines all truths, how do we know that our truths are
His, or worse still that He is not tricking us and changing truths everyday?
What good does our God-given faculty of reason do us under these
circumstances? Malebranche clearly does not think that Descartes vindication of reason by proving the existence of an all perfect, all good God does
the trick. Perhaps he shared Arnaulds famous worry that Descartes reasoned in a circle by using reason to argue for a proof of a benevolent God
who would not trick reason.
In any case, Malebranche thought that such a conception of God undermined all possibility of objective truth or of gaining a rational explanation
of anything in the universe:
Surely, if eternal laws and truths depended on God, if they have been
established by a free volition of the Creator, in short, if the Reason we
consult were not necessary and independent, it seems evident to me that
there would no longer be any true science and that we might be mistaken
in claiming that the arithmetic or geometry of the Chinese is like our
own. For in the final analysis, if it were not absolutely necessary that twice
four be eight, or that the three angles of a triangle be equal to two right
28
Nicolas Malebranche
angles, what assurance would we have that these kinds of truths are not
like those that are found in certain universities, or that last only for a
certain time?12
Descartes might protest that the immutability of the divine will guarantees
the immutability of his decrees; as such, the divinely decreed eternal truths,
once chosen, remain immutable and so certainty is saved. Malebranche
rejects such a move precisely because if God were indifferent originally
in choosing what counted as truth, such truths would lack a necessary
foundation and so could never become necessary. As for me, I can conceive no necessity in indifference, nor can I reconcile two things that are so
opposite.13 Truths based on the arbitrary will of God would be just that
arbitrary, and so merely contingent.
As Ginette Dreyfus notes, the immutability of the divine will alone does
not guarantee the immutability of its effectsGod could immutably will
changing effects.14 God could immutably will, for example, that 2 + 2 = 4 for
the first 100 years of creation, that 2 + 2 = 5 for the second 100 years, and so
on. If willing this is impossible, however, it can only be because the truths
themselves are necessary. If the eternal truths are of such a nature that the
will doesnt have the power to institute them as other than immutable, that
will is not indifferent in relation to them. If, on the contrary, the will is indifferent, it can institute them as provisional and changing.15 In other words,
if God had to institute truths immutable, they were already immutable by
their very nature. God does not will them to be so. And if it is up to
the divine will to institute any truths whatsoever (even that 2 + 2 = 5),
those truths will be arbitrary because of this foundation in indifference.
For Malebranche, only if the divine will subordinates itself to the divine
reason is a rational universe guaranteed.
In sum, according to Malebranche, if we found eternal truths only in the
will of God we would be in deep trouble: for we could not know Gods will
and the truths themselves would be arbitrary. As Malebranche sees it, basing truth on Gods power turns God into a dictator and truth into a sham.
Such an account does not do justice to the concept of an infinitely perfect
being; such an account would drive us to nihilism or skepticism. Indeed,
Malebranche points out in The Search after Truth that the vision in God
shared by all minds founds and guarantees objective truth:
to maintain that ideas that are eternal, immutable, and common to all
intelligences, are only perceptions or momentary particular modifications of the mind, is to establish Pyrrhonism and to make room for the
29
belief that what is moral or immoral is not necessarily so, which is the
most dangerous error of all.16
If we did not all see the same ideas in the mind of God, then we would be
vulnerable to the skeptical conclusion that reality might not match up to
our necessarily individual, subjective perceptions, or that we all had our
own morality and opinion on the perfections of beings.
For precisely these reasons, Malebranche thinks that his case for the
vision in God and the consubstantiality of Reason with God is even stronger.
Only if we see eternal, immutable, necessary truths in Gods wisdom can we
be sure of them. And those truths are eternal and necessary in the first
place precisely because God finds them in His Reason and does not create
them. Finally, because He is an infinitely perfect being, God can only act in
ways that honor Himby submitting His power to plans that demonstrate
His wisdom. Malebranche thinks that such reasoning establishes that the
essential rule of the will of God is order17; this is the only rational explanation, and the only explanation compatible with Gods nature.
Now Malebranche has argued that we do all see the same ideas and
relations between them (truths) in God; thus we can know something of
what God knows and of what God esteems or values. Malebranche tends to
use truth as shorthand for relations of magnitude, facts about numbers,
and geometrical relations. Such speculative truths, or relations, however,
are much less important to his metaphysical system than relations of perfection or order that govern Gods will and conduct:
It must be considered, then, that God loves Himself with a necessary love,
and that thus He loves what in Him represents or contains greater
perfection more than what contains less . . . for Gods love is necessarily
proportionate to the order among the intelligible beings He contains,
since He necessarily loves His own perfections. As a result of this, the
order that is purely speculative has the force of law with regard to God
Himself, given, as is certainly the case, that God necessarily loves Himself
and that He cannot contradict Himself.18
The key here is Malebranches implicit premise that an infinitely perfect
being can be only be motivated by love of Himself and His perfections, the
only ends worthy of Him. Thus relations of perfection, which might first
also appear to be merely speculative truths, which do not move the will,
become a law binding God. For an infinitely perfect being necessarily
loves Himself and necessarily acts in ways that honor His own perfections.
30
Nicolas Malebranche
God has no other end in His operations than Himself. Order would have
it so.19
God differently values ideas in Him that represent various beings
according to their amount of perfection: those [perfections], for example,
that represent bodies are not as noble as those that represent minds, and
furthermore, that even among those that represent only bodies or only
minds, there are infinite degrees of perfection.20 As will be explained in
the last two chapters, minds that exercise their freedom and are accordingly more rational, possessing a stronger union to the divine mind, are,
according to Malebranche, more perfect than minds that wallow in sensual
pleasures. And they are more perfect because they participate more in the
divine mind and its perfections. God thus honors Himself by esteeming
that which bears a greater relation to the perfections that He loves. Indeed,
Gods necessary self-love means that He must esteem creatures more or
less depending on their rank in a hierarchy of perfections. God Himself
is constrained to follow this order by the necessary love He bears for
Himself.21
The principle behind this claim is quite simple: the infinitely perfect
being must act perfectly, and He does this by acting in ways that honor His
attributes of goodness, wisdom, justice, power, immutability, and so on.
Limiting Himself by submitting his power to His wisdom, then, does not
really constrain, but rather fulfills or honors Gods power:
For it seems evident to me that the infinitely perfect Being loves Himself
infinitely, loves Himself necessarily; that His will is but the love He has for
Himself and for His divine perfections; that the movement of His love
cannot, as with us, come to Him from without, nor consequently lead
Him outside Himself; that being uniquely the principle of His action,
He must be its end.22
Malebranches reasoning here depends on the implicit premise that an
infinitely perfect being is totally self-sufficient. We might reconstruct his
argument as follows: (1) God is the infinitely perfect being; (2) an infinitely
perfect being is perfectly self-sufficient; (3) so God relies on no external
motives for His action; (4) Gods only motive or end comes from Himself;
thus (5) God loves or moves toward Himself alonethat is, His will is
simply love of Himself and the perfections that make up His essence.
Further, because God loves Himself by the necessity of His being,23 He
also necessarily follows order.24 Gods infinite power means that whatever
He wills happens; His infinite wisdom determines what ways of acting will
31
honor Him; and His necessary love for Himself means that He will only will
accordingly. As Malebranche argues in The Dialogues: God never acts except
according to what He is, except to honor His divine attributes, and to satisfy
what He owes Himself. For He is to Himself the source and end of all His
volitions.25 Because God necessarily loves Himself, He only acts in ways that
honor Him. Because He invincibly loves His own perfections, He necessarily loves according to the hierarchy of those perfections. Now the hierarchy
of relations of perfections or attributes in God is order: Gods self-love
necessitates His submitting His will to His wisdom. As Ginette Dreyfus states
this point, as the love of order is nothing but an expression of the love that
God bears for Himself, it is as necessary and immutable as this love.26
Indeed, Malebranche uses this love of order to justify Gods creation of
the world. For as God is self-sufficient, it is hard to see why or how He could
be moved to create anything outside Himself. Indeed, since the gap between
the finite and the infinite is infinite, God could never be motivated to act
for the sake of limited beings such as ourselves.27 But God can be motivated
to act for His own glory, to celebrate and to expresses the perfections He
invincibly loves. God achieves this by rendering creation divine, through
the union of Jesus Christ to the substances of mind and body that compose
the universe:
He thereby elevates it [creation] infinitely and, principally because of the
divinity He communicates to it, He receives from it that first glory which
is related to that of the architects who constructed a house which
does them honor because it expresses the qualities they are proud to
possess . . . the subject of His glory is simply the relation of His work to the
perfections of which He is proud.28
Although God goes outside Himself through His creation, then, the
motive for that creation remains within HimGod acts solely for the sake
of His glory, to honor the perfections that He loves. The Incarnation of
Christ, which brings about this glory, is the principle of Gods action in
creation.29
Suppose Malebranche is right: even the creation of the world comes
about only because of Gods necessary love for Himself, through His desire
to honor His perfections. Malebranche must still justify his specific interpretation of what kinds of actions honor Gods attributes. Malebranche
claims, for instance, that God only acts via general volitions. But why should
this follow from Gods aiming to honor His perfections? Malebranche, like
Leibniz, assumes that the principle of sufficient reason demands that there
32
Nicolas Malebranche
beat least in principlea rational explanation for everything that occurs

in the universe, even for Gods actions. Thus they both developed theodicies justifying and explaining the apparent evil consequences of Gods
actions. Analysis of the concept of God qua infinitely perfect being satisfies
this demand in general by explaining that the rule of Gods will is order,
that He can only act in ways that honor His perfections. Now the task is to
satisfy this demand in particular, by explaining how God must act to satisfy
orders requirements.
Malebranche builds upon this fundamental analysis of the order that is
Gods law to establish how God must operate in creation. He moves from a
general analysis that God must act in ways that honor Him, for example,
to specific claims concerning Gods governing creation. This kind of
extension outward from Gods nature to the laws of nature He uses to
govern and to facts about the nature of minds and bodies exhibits the
systematic linkage of everything in Malebranches metaphysics back to God.
The ramifications of this for his explanation of human freedom will become
evident in successive chapters. First, however, it will be useful to examine
Gods way of governing the realms of nature and grace.
II. Introduction to God and General Volitions

Malebranche bases his arguments for God acting via general volitions in the
realms of nature and grace on an analysis of (1) God as an infinitely perfect
being and (2) order as the essential limit that God places upon himself. The
rule of Gods will is order: He must act in ways that bear the character of His
perfections or attributes. This principle grounds the various arguments
packed into the following passage from The Treatise on Nature and Grace:
An excellent workman should proportion his action to his work; he does
not accomplish by quite complex means that which he can execute by
simpler ones, he does not act without an end, and never makes useless
efforts. From this one must conclude that God, discovering in the infinite
treasures of His wisdom an infinity of possible worlds . . . determines
Himself to create that world which could have been produced and preserved by the simplest laws, and which ought to be the most perfect, with
respect to the simplicity of the ways necessary to its production or to its
conservation.30
The passage exhibits three distinct lines of argument. Analysis of the order
that is Gods law determines that God proportions His action to His work,
33
thus: (1) He acts via simple rather than complex means; (2) He acts for an
end; and (3) He makes no useless efforts. An infinitely perfect being is by
definition self-sufficient, and has no need to create anything. If He does
create, He necessarily acts in a way that honors His immutability, wisdom,
and other perfections.
If God creates, both the end product (our world) and the means of
creation/conservation (His volitions or laws) must honor Him. This is the
proportion or balance that must exist between His way of acting and what
He produces. As Malebranche succinctly puts this in 1688s Dialogues on
Metaphysics and Religion: what God wills uniquely, directly, absolutely in His
plans is always to act as divinely as possible. It is to make His action as well
as His work bear the character of His attributes; it is to act exactly according
to what He is and according to all that He is.31 God must balance the ultimate perfection of His creation with the simplicity of means of production.
This argument for God governing creation via general volitions, then, is
based on this claim that God must consider both what He makes and how
He makes it.
In a claim nicely differentiating his theodicy from Leibnizs, Malebranche
asserts that God could, in theory, make a world more perfect that the
one in which we livea world free of monsters and natural disasters,
for example.32 But to do this God would have to violate the simplicity
of His ways by multiplying the laws of motion, adding such laws, for
example, as rain must only fall on fertile cropland and never on barren
seas to the current laws of motion based only on impact of bodies. But
God would never choose to create such a world, made via unnecessarily
complex means because then there would no longer be that proportion
between the action of God and his work, which is necessary in order to
determine an infinitely wise being to act.33 A world with too many laws
apparently would fail to honor Gods simplicity, even if it might honor
His goodness more. Some equilibrium or balance among His attributes
must be reached in order for God to be motivated to act and create the
world.34
The key to understanding Gods action in the worldthat is, the laws of
natureis to grasp that God does not act by particular volitions. So He did
not will the laws of motion with the intent of producing any particular bad
result: He willed these laws because of their fruitfulness, and not of their
sterility. Thus that which He willed, He still wills.35 Malebranche is making
a distinction based on the content or direction of Gods intention in willing:
God aims, so to speak, at general laws of nature and their place in the overall design of the world He wants to create rather than at any particular
34
Nicolas Malebranche
event per se. Gods willing particular events, then, is a mere consequence or
by-product of His willing general effects. Whereas [t]he laws of nature are
constant and immutable; they are general for all times and for all places,
when rain falls on fallow land or a monstrous child is born it is not that
God has willed these things by particular wills; it is because He has established laws for the communication of motion, of which these effects are
necessary consequences.36
Malebranche puts the point even more forcefully in the Dialogues:
He [God] does not allow monsters; it is He who makes them. But He
makes them only in order to alter nothing in His action, only out of
respect for the generality of His ways, only to follow exactly the laws of
nature He has established and has nonetheless established not for the
monstrous effects they must produce, but for those effects more worthy
of His wisdom and goodness. For He wills them only indirectly, only
because they are the natural consequences of His laws.37
Recall that God can only act in ways that honor His attributes; simple,
general laws do so and thus rule out His intervening at every moment to
spare us suffering or to create the most favorable situation for that moment
alone. The constant, regular path of acting in accord with general laws
honors Gods simplicity and immutability. And the fruitfulness of achieving
many effects via these few simple laws bears witness to Gods wisdom and
foreknowledge.
Order mandates simple rather than complex ways; only these honor
God. This constant, lawful governance of creationwhich we can observe
in the natural world around us, in the regularity of motion of bodies, for
examplealso follows from an analysis of God qua infinitely perfect
and the order that governs His conduct. For wisdom is also one of Gods
attributes and as such has a role to play in explaining why God must work
in general ways: The more enlightened an agent is, the more extensive
are his volitions.38 God does not change His mind or will capriciously as
do limited intellects, nor does He cobble together a complex mess of
particular causes to act upon the world. A limited mind is incapable of
making and sticking to long-term plans, but hatches new plans at every
moment, depending on the situation. Finite agents deploy various means,
some of which fail because they have not compared means and ends. In
contrast, a broad and penetrating mind considers and compares means
and ends, and forms his plans accordingly.39 God is the ultimate resolute
chooser.40
35
Indeed, many laws do not show foresight but rather its lack; it takes more
wisdom to select simple yet fruitful laws:
God, whose wisdom has no limits, must then make use of means which
are very simple and very fruitful in the formation of the future world [the
afterlife/realm of grace], as in the preservation of the present world. He
ought not to multiply His wills, which are the executive laws of His plans,
any further than necessity obliges. He must act through general wills, and
thus establish a constant and lawful order.41
In heaven and on earth, God can only act in simple ways and via general
laws, because such conduct honors His perfections. Here again we see the
concept of a balance or proportion among Gods attributes. Considerations
of wisdom and goodness, in concert with those of simplicity and immutability, rule out a world with many unneeded or variable laws. Goodness
demands a fruitful and orderly world; wisdom and simplicity rule out
multiplying laws beyond necessity, immutability rules out unnecessarily
changing laws.
The principles that justify Gods conduct in the realm of nature explain
His actions in the realm of grace as well. God, as author of both the realms
of nature and grace, must govern both realms with the simplest possible
general laws. Just as the physical world is governed by simple, general
laws, so grace is distributed to men by simple, general laws. God therefore saves as many persons as He can save, acting according to the
adorable laws which His wisdom prescribes to Him.42 In his famous rain
analogy, Malebranche claims that even as the general, simple laws of
motion sometimes cause rain to fall into the sea instead of on the fertile
field, the general, simple laws of grace sometimes cause grace to fall onto
hardened hearts instead of on prepared ones. In neither case have we any
basis for complaint. God does not will our misfortunes with a particular
will; these are the necessary consequences of the fruitful, simple, and
general laws worthiest of God.43
In the Treatise on Ethics (1684) Malebranche points out that if God did act
by particular wills, it would be a rebellion against God to resist Him by
trying to seek shelter from the rain He caused to fall or to escape from
the building that He caused to collapse. For if God willed these events
directly, with a particular will aimed at bringing them about, we would
criminally resist and insult the will of our maker in seeking to escape from
them. God acts via general volitions, however, so we need not embrace
36
Nicolas Malebranche
passive resignation in the face of natural disasters:

because God acts in consequence of general laws which He has established,
we rectify His work without offending His wisdom. We resist His actions
without resisting His will, because He does not positively and directly will
each deed He does. Of course, He never wills unjust actions, for example,
murders, though He moves the arms of those who commit them. And
although only God orders rain to fall, everyone is permitted to seek cover
when it is raining. For God moves our arms only in consequence of the
general laws of soul-body union, laws which He did not establish so that
men would kill each other. He makes rain fall only as a necessary consequence of the laws of motion, laws that He has not made in order that
everyone should be soaked by rain, but for designs greater and worthier
of His wisdom and goodness. If it rains on men, if it rains in the sea and
on the sands, it is because God must not change the uniformity of His
conduct simply because consequences either useless or unfortunate
should follow therefrom.44
I am permitted to seek shelter precisely because Gods intention is directed
not at making rain fall on me right now, but at the worthier end of
honoring His attributes (such as His immutability). Any particular event,
although caused by God, is an indirect consequence of His greater plan.
Thus I am free to abuse the will of God by willing and thus occasioning Him
to move my arm to kill my enemy, for God will not upset the uniformity of
His conduct and dishonor Himself by acting via a particular volition to stop
this unfortunate event.
Finally, Malebranche emphasizes both that a wise agent must act for an
end never fruitlessly. For this reason, he concludes God cannot act by particular volitions. Indeed, according to Malebranche, we can only solve the
problem of evil if we assume that God only operates by general volitions.
Consider that rain often falls on fallow land, or grace on hardened hearts.
If God made it rain in these places with a particular planinstead of as
necessary consequences of the general laws which He has established in
order to produce the best effects45He would lack power, goodness, or
wisdom. Similarly, if God gave grace to the sinner via a particular will, then
He must have had a particular plan to save the sinner. But if this gift
accomplishes nothing, then God is frustrated in his attempt, since He has
given it [grace] with a particular aim of doing good to this sinner.46 This
failure would count as a lack of power on Gods part. Worse, if God gave
sinners grace, knowing that (as sometimes happens) it would fail and make
37
them even more criminal, He would lack goodness. Indeed, Malebranche

mocks those who believe that God intervenes with a particular providence
to guarantee, for example, that the just party wins a duel. As they might
argue, if we presuppose that God acts by particular volitions, as most
people believe, then what impiety it would be to fear that He might favor
injustice or that His providence might not extend to all things!47 The most
casual observation of the world reveals that the just and good do not
always prevail, in duels or otherwise. So one who believes that God acts
via particular wills must explain why God appears to fail so often.
Given the evil that we observe actually existing in the world, if we claimed
that God acted by particular volitions and thus directly willed each bad
event, we would be asserting that God is bad. When God produces hail that
destroys the fields of a good farmer, then we must decide whether God did
this as an unfortunate consequence of general laws or willed via a particular
volition that this event happen:
If God produces this effect by a particular providence, then far from
providing for all, He positively wills and even brings it about that the
most virtuous person in the land goes without bread. It is better, then, to
maintain that this grievous effect is a natural consequence of general laws.
And that is what we commonly mean when we say that God permitted a
particular misfortune.48
To sum up: if God acted via particular volitions attuned to each case, instead
of with a particular corresponding volition according to general laws, God
would be directly and willfully responsible for evil and suffering. If God
tacked together particular plans for particular events, instead of willing a
general end covering many events, He would lack foresight and wisdom.
Particular wills cannot be the method of Gods operation in the created
realm.
III. Analysis of Gods General Willing and Occasionalism

At this point, an obvious question arises: what exactly does Malebranche
mean by general versus particular will, and how precisely does this distinction
bear on the doctrine of occasionalism? If God only acts by general volitions,
how is He causally responsible for each and every event in nature? How are
Gods volitions individuated? We might interpret God qua true cause acting
through general wills as either: (1) God wills the general laws governing the
38
Nicolas Malebranche
realms of nature once and for all, setting up reciprocal modalities between
mind and body, mind and divine Reason, and Christs prayers and grace
in advance (in a fashion similar to Leibnizean preestablished harmony);
or (2) God must continuously act in the world to keep up law-like correspondences between occasional causes and their effects. In a discussion of
these competing interpretations, Steven Nadler argues that the former view
of Malebranches general willpurportedly held by Arnauld, Nicholas
Jolley, and Desmond Clarke, among othersis incorrect.49
Nadler attributes to all three a view best represented by a passage from
Arnauld comparing occasionalism and preestablished harmony:
This is to say the same thing in other terms that those say who maintain
that my will is the occasional cause for the movement of my arm and that
God is its real cause; for they do not claim that God does this at the
moment by a new act of will each time that I wish to raise my arm but by
a single act of the eternal will by which He has chosen to do everything
which He has foreseen that it will be necessary to do, in order that the
universe might be such as He has decided it ought to be.50
Nadler holds that reading Malebranche from such a perspective is incorrect
precisely because it assumes that Gods acting by general wills rules out
Gods willing at time t on occasion a to move my arm because I so will.
Nadler contends that such an interpretation vitiates Gods causal power, as
Malebranche would have understood it, by making Him causally responsible only for general, universal decrees and not for particular events.51
Nadler argues that the more traditional reading of Malebranches God as
always present and active in the universe is the proper one, provided we
understand what Malebranche means by Gods general volitions. According to Nadler, Malebranches acting by general volitions amounts to acting in
terms of general laws. God has particular events as objects of His volitions.
Because He always acts according to general laws, these volitions are called
general. Gods volitions are general not because they deal with only
general events, but because they are ordered according to general laws. It is
not as if Gods acting by general volitions rules out His being the causal
force in each individual case:
Malebranches God is directly and immediately responsible for each and
every particular effect in nature; that is, that Gods activity as efficient
cause is constant, ubiquitous, and necessary. At the very moment when
one billiard ball strikes another, God wills efficaciously then and there to
move the second ball. The second balls motion is not the immediate
39
result of some general volitions by God at creation with regard to the

motions of bodies . . . Rather, it is the immediate result of a discrete
volitional act by God on this particular occasion (on the axiomatic
assumption that if God moves an object on a particular occasion, God
must will or have a volition to move the object on that occasion).52
Nadler concludes that Malebranches commitment to Gods continuous creation of the universe obliges us to read the divine general volition about
any given event as a discrete and temporalized volition with a particular
content . . . in accordance with the general laws he has established.53
Thus Malebranche defines particular volitions as volitions that are arbitrary
or not in accordance with divine laws (such as in the case of miracles).54
Malebranches own attempts to elucidate the concept of general willings
appear to support Nadlers interpretation. In the 1681 edition of the
Treatise, Malebranche added an illustration on particular versus general
wills that explains: (1) I say that God acts by general wills, when He acts in
consequence of general laws which He has established; and (2) I say on
the contrary that God acts by particular wills when the efficacy of His will
is not determined at all by some general law to produce some effect.55
Indeed, Malebranche reiterates that Godthe one true causedoes all in
all things: properly speaking, what is called nature is nothing other than
the general laws which God has established to construct or to preserve
his work by very simple means, by an action which is uniform, constant,
perfectly worthy of an infinite wisdom and of a universal cause.56 God acts
via general volitions insofar as His causal activity is regular, orderly, and in
conformity with the laws of nature that He prescribed at creation. This
activity is general because it is law-like in relation to all the individual
events in the world, not because it is non-specific or only capable of determining general events. Perhaps Nadler is right: general volitions include a
particular temporalized content for every natural event.
Desmond Clarke, however, finds Nadlers talk of temporalized volitions
and Gods acting in time on particular occasions problematic. Recall that
Nadler accused Clarke (along with Arnauld) of wrongly assimilating
occasionalism to pre-established harmony. According to Clarke as saying,
creation and conservation is an atemporal, unique action on Gods part
which bears little comparison with the repeated interventions of the
assiduous watchmaker.57 Clarke argues that we could only reconcile
Malebranches occasionalism with Nadlers account of divine general volitions by making a numerical distinction between Gods various causal
actions. But, says Clarke, multiplying distinct and temporally indexed
actions in God is incoherent.58
40
Nicolas Malebranche
Clarke objects to attributing to God the potentially infinite number of

volitional acts needed to account for each change in nature. He also rejects
Nadlers picture of God acting at the same time as the events He causes:
Thus, not only do Gods actions correspond one-to-one with the causal
events in which he is involved, but he seems to act at the same time as the
natural events which presuppose his causal agency.59 Multiplying acts in
God is inconsistent with Gods simplicity, and Gods acting in time is flat
out incoherent. Clarke wonders why God must constantly will that something exists rather than simply willing that it exist constantly, hinting at
his own preference for Gods initially setting up creation and then letting it
run on its own.60 Clarke does not, however, explain how initially willing that
something exist constantly could account for changes in that object, or
for that objects ultimate demise.
Clarke supports his reading of Malebranchean general volitions as some
kind of single, all-encompassing, eternal volition by pressing the watchmaker analogy. He points to passages such as the following:
Certainly it requires a greater breadth of mind to create a watch which,
according to the laws of mechanism, goes by itself and regularly . . . than
to make one which cannot run correctly if He who has made it does not
change something in it at every moment according to the situations it is
placed in.61
Clarke glosses this passage as contrasting a poor watchmaker who must
intervene constantly to keep the watch going and a smart watchmaker
who set it going accurately when it is first made.62 According to Clarke,
Gods involvement in the natural world resembles that of the smart watchmaker: God does not have to intervene in the world by being responsible
for each individual event in it.
Yet using words such as intervene to describe Gods action if God does
indeed possess particular volitions loads Clarkes interpretation. His language implies an interpretation that needs defending. Why must Gods
being the causal force in each and every casein accord with the general
laws of naturecount as an intervention in the course of nature?
Indeed, in the phrases following his description of creating a good watch,
Malebranche continues:
to establish general laws, and to choose the simplest ones, which are at
the same time the most fruitful, is a way of acting worthy of Him whose
wisdom has no bounds; and by contrast to act by particular wills indicates
41
a limited intelligence which cannot compare the consequences or the

effects of the l[e]ast fruitful causes.63
The wise creator sets up general laws and follows them. The contrast
Malebranche is making here is not between an intervening and a hands-off
creator, but between a farsighted planner setting up a regular path for his
action and a shortsighted ruler who changes his mind and wills at every
moment. Only the former is a way of acting worthy of an all wise creator.
It is not that God acts in nature that is the problem Malebranche seeks to
explain, but how He acts.
There is no independent course of nature for God to intervene in:
God only intervenes if He changes or violates the regularities according
to which nature evolves.64 This is what could be attributed to a particular
will. Malebranches distaste for such ad hoc interventions in nature emerges
in the evolution of his account of miracles. Whereas in 1684s Treatise on
Nature and Grace Malebranche explained miracles precisely as such particular exceptions to the laws of nature, by 1688s Dialogues on Metaphysics and
Religion he suggests that even here God probably acts only by general
volitions:
When God performs a miracle and does not act as a consequence of the
general laws which are known to us, I maintain either that God acts as a
consequence of other laws unknown to us, or that what He does then is
determined by certain circumstances He had in view from all eternity in
undertaking that simple, eternal and invariable act which contains both
the general laws of His ordinary providence and also the exceptions to
those very laws.65
Reasoning from the immutability and other attributes of an infinitely
perfect being, Malebranche seems determinedeven in cases that appear
to us to violate lawsto argue that God acts in accord with general laws. But
God is still causally responsible for every event in heaven and earth insofar
as He is the moving force of bodies and minds and He set up and follows
the general laws regulating their interaction.
Admittedly, talk of a single, eternal and invariable act makes talk of a
one-to-one correspondence between Gods volitions and the causal events
that they bring about problematic. Yet this need not push us into Clarke
(and Arnauld, and Jolleys) pseudo-Leibnizean reading of Malebranche.
Malebranche himself argues that reconciling Gods unity and the multiplicity of His perfections is a puzzle beyond human solution66reconciling
42
Nicolas Malebranche
divine simplicity and a multiplicity of discrete volitions or Gods eternity

with an action in time is a similar problem beyond human comprehension:
[f]or you should know that, in order to judge worthily of God, we must
attribute to Him only incomprehensible attributes. That is evident since
God is the infinite in every sense . . . and since anything that is infinite in
every sense is incomprehensible in every respect to the human mind.67
The finite mind cannot hope to comprehend the infinite. And while such
a lack of explanation might weaken Malebranches overall theory, it need
not drive us to grossly misinterpret it; such would be the case if we broke the
connection between God as one true cause and each and every particular
effect in creation. Gods decrees are eternal and immutable, but they still
must correspond to all natural changes:
God made these decrees, or rather He formulates them unceasingly in
His eternal wisdom which is the inviolable rule of His volitions. And
although the effects of these decrees are infinite and produce thousands
and thousands of changes in the universe, these decrees are always the
same. This is because the efficacy of these decrees is determined to action
only by the circumstances of those causes we call natural and which I
believe should be called occasional, for fear of encouraging the dangerous prejudice of a nature and efficacy distinguished from Gods will and
omnipotence.68
God does not will and then change His mind; indeed, God does not change
His volitions, His thoughts, plans, or nature. Changes we see in the natural
world do not equal change in the creator.
Malebranches insistence that we beware the prejudice of believing in any
efficacy distinct from God undercuts interpretations of Malebranches God
as setting up the world like a watch and letting it run. As Nadler points out,
even if general laws were, per impossibile, causes, they would underdetermine
particular events in nature. If God does not carry out His laws by serving as
the causal force in nature, creatures must do so. Malebranche unequivocally rejects placing causal power in the natural world or created natures,
however. As Nadler succinctly summarizes, this rejecting of creaturely power
is precisely why Gods general volitions cannot be reduced to the God of
Leibnizean pre-established harmony:
Leibnizs god creates and sustains a world of causally active (but not interactive) beings, beings characterized by productive natures. Events and
states of affairs in the world have as their proximate causes the natures of
43
or principles in things. Malebranches God, on the other hand, creates

and sustains a world devoid of natures and powers, a world of inactive,
causally inert finite beings.69
Nadlers warning not to misinterpret Malebranches metaphysics by
investing creatures with causal powers should be coupled with a warning
not to succumb to the related error of reifying the laws of nature.
Nicholas Jolley commits this very mistake when he argues:
Gods general laws are efficacious by their very nature . . . It is true, it
seems, that in addition to willing the laws, God must will the initial conditions; otherwise no determinate universe will come into existence . . . But
it is a mistake to suppose that any further divine volitions are needed in
order to insure conformity to law.70
This interpretation, however, cannot be right: it makes the laws of nature
into causal agents. Laws are not the kind of things that could even be candidates for agency, however. Further, as we have seen, in Malebranches
universe God is the sole causal agent. Jolley mistakes Malebranches talk of
the laws of nature as the efficacious volitions of the creator for an assertion
that the laws somehow gain true efficaciousness from the creator.71 When
God moves a body, for example, He acts in accord with the laws of nature that
He Himself instituted to govern His action in the world. It is God, not the
laws, who acts: the motive force of a body is but the efficacy of the will of
God, who conserves it successively in different places.72
Efficacious laws and creatures carrying out the will of a divine watchmaker
may be an appealing picture of the universe, but it is a misreading of
Malebranche. The misreading arises from attempts to understand opaque
passages in which Malebranche talks of creation and conservation as but
a single volition.73 Malebranche utilizes such descriptions when he is
emphasizing the divine immutability, stressing that: in God there is no
succession of thoughts and volitions, that by an eternal and immutable act
He knows everything and wills everything He wills.74 Such descriptions
might seem to rule out a multiplicity of volitions in God. If God is to be
causally responsible for each and every state in nature (and Malebranche
firmly thinks that He is), there must be a volition corresponding to each
temporal, particular event. Otherwise, some states of affairs would occur
independently of Gods direct causal action. Yet Gods constant creation of
the world rules out anything in the world existing for which He is not
directly causally responsible.
44
Nicolas Malebranche
As argued earlier, Malebranche did not imagine that this correspondence

between divine volitions and states of affairs violated the divine immutability
and simplicity. True, Malebranche sometimes speaks of Gods creative
volition as a simple and invariable act. And this might appear to rule out
multiple volitions in God.75 But recall that Malebranche also described God
as perfectly simple yet possessing all perfections and realities. Malebranche
believed that the apparent conflict between Gods immutability and His
willing each event in the world resulted from our finite intellects inability
to grasp the attributes or ways of being of Godfor these ways of being are
forever infinite in every sense, forever divine, and consequently forever
incomprehensible.76 The rule by which we must judge Gods conduct is by
considering whether or not it is worthy of a divine being, whether or not it
accords with order. We cannot explain how God is simple and yet possesses
all perfections, although we know that this must be the case; an infinitely
perfect being must have both of these characteristics.
Likewise, although we cannot fully comprehend how God could act via a
single volition containing all He wills and all He knows, this is the only
explanation consistent with order: only God is the true cause, so only God
can be the causal force behind every change in nature, while remaining
Himself immutable. Change in nature need not entail change in the
creator:
For although He willed some [decrees and events] for a time, He did not
change His mind and will when that time was up; rather, a single act of
His will is referred to the differences of time contained in His eternity.
Thus, God does not change, and He cannot change His thoughts, His
plans, His volitions.77
There being no succession in God does not rule out that this once-for-all act
comprises various volitions related to particular events in time. In the same
incomprehensible way that God is always one and always infinite, perfectly
simple and composed, as it were, of all realities or all perfections,78 God
can continuously operate in creation via a single volition indexed to every
particular event in heaven and on earth. This volition might be like an
infiniteyet still unitaryconjunction.79
The key to thinking about this problem lies in a distinction Malebranche
discusses between the divine eternity and the time of creation. Time exists
in eternity, but eternity does not exist in time. Indeed, the whole of
creation exists in the substance of the creator. It is in Him that we
have movement and life, as the apostle says: In Him we live, and move,
45
and are.80 Succession occurs in time; it can neither limit nor describe
how God acts within eternity:
all times succeed one another in His eternity. God is always everything He
is without succession in time . . . God created the world, but the volition
to create it is not in the past. God will change the world, but the volition
to change it is not in the future. The will of God which was and will be is
an eternal and immutable act whose effects change without there being
any change in God. In a word, God was not, He will not be, but He is.81
Denying that successive volitions exist in God points out Gods eternity; but
it still permits that this single act is referred to the differences of time
contained in His eternity.82 Admitting that we do not understand how this
occurs does not diminish the divine, but is simply an acknowledgment of
the limited nature of our intellect. This is incomprehensible, I agree, but
that is because the infinite surpasses us.83 To deny that God is causally
responsible for each and every particular event in the world, however, would
diminish Gods power as the one true cause. Order demands that God can
only act in ways that honor His perfections.
Clarke, Jolley, and Arnauld,84 in assimilating occasionalism to preestablished harmony, are at odds with Malebranches official position. Only
our limited conception of the infinite causes us to stumble in grasping
how in God one single, eternal act can be causally related to the multiplicity
of events in the created world. Yet even our limited intellect can grasp that
Gods acting by general volitions cannot rule out His being the cause of
each and every event in the natural world. We must accept both the puzzle
that God is One but contains many perfections, and that He performs a
single, purportedly simple creative act that contains volitions responsible
for many events, rather than try to deny these facts and in so doing violate
the Order that circumscribes all of our descriptions of God.
Chapter 3
Arnauld and Malebranche on the Power

of the Human Intellect
Antoine Arnauld (161294), a fellow priest and devoted Cartesian, changed

from an early friend to a committed opponent of Malebranches philosophy. Although initially impressed by Malebranches The Search after Truth,
Arnauld reacted with horror to the doctrines contained within his friends
work Treatise on Nature and Grace (1680).1 Specifically, Arnauld detested
Malebranches extension of general governing laws from the realm of
nature to the realm of grace and he realized that the seeds of this doctrine
lay within Malebranches earlier work. As Arnauld reads him, Malebranches
vision in God and his doctrine of ideas are the root of the evils that develop
in his later, more theological work.2 Accordingly, Arnauld published his
work On True and False Ideas (1683) as an extended attack on this aspect of
Malebranches metaphysics. As Arnauld describes his strategy:
In the meantime, it [Ideas] will be useful, if I am not mistaken, to diminish the inflated opinion which many have of the reliability of our friends
mind: and it will be expected that he might well have been mistaken in
the matter of grace, if it can be shown that he has wandered strangely
astray in the questions of metaphysics, which he has always claimed as his
strong point.3
After Arnaulds opening salvo, the philosophical and personal battle
continued, through books, letters, and journal articles, until their respective deaths. Although their debate grew acerbic and rhetorical as the years
progressed, Arnaulds pushing forced Malebranche to clarify or at least
elaborate upon his views on human passivity and agency. This will be the
focus of this chapter.
From early on in their debate, it becomes evident that this is a battle
between two somewhat deviant Cartesians, each building from a different
starting point, each refusing to consider the others point of view. Arnauld is
The Power of the Human Intellect
47
often described as the more faithful Cartesian; but he departed from

Descartes by claiming that the soul is uniformly active, even in the understanding. This devotion to activity conflicted with Arnaulds Jansenist4
leanings in the realm of grace, where he made human beings completely
passive while waiting for saving grace. Thus Arnauld seems to want human
beings to be totally responsible for intellection, but not at all for their
salvation.5 Malebranche took a more moderate course, by extending
Descartes occasionalistic tendencies and structuring his philosophy around
all of creations passivity, while still trying to carve out a small space for
human agency. Malebranche wants to make us partially responsible for what
I call our intellectualspiritual salvation: in the case of grace, God gives our
wills motion toward the good, but we are responsible for consenting or not
to that motion (see Chapter 5); in the case of intellection, God gives us all of
our ideas, when we focus our attention.
Ironically, Malebranches emphasis on the power of the human will to
determine its focus in the quest for intellectualspiritual salvation would
draw protest from Arnauld, the purported champion of the human souls
thorough-going activity. It is important to recall that Arnauld goes back to
attack The Search after Truth, and the human understandings passivity in the
Vision in God, in service of removing the philosophical underpinnings to
what he considered the neo-Pelagean6 theology behind the activity of the
human will in Malebranches explanation of grace. Arnauld has a bigger
target in mind than Malebranchean ideas per se. On this point I am in
agreement with Elmar J. Kremers assessment that Arnaulds On True and
False Ideas strives to offer a traditional logic or guide to the minds epistemic
limits and the nature of ideas in order to forearm his readers against the
mistake which he says lies at the origin of Malebranches theodicy, the
mistake of transgressing the limits of human knowledge of God.7
In other words, Arnauld believes that because Malebranche first went
astray about the nature of ideas, he subsequently errs about the knowledge
gleaned from our idea of God, and thus gives a flawed account of the nature
of the human minds relation to God. It is worth noting that in contrast with
Arnaulds schizophrenic commitment to full human intellectual activity
and total human spiritual passivity, Malebranches thorough-going philosophical and theological commitment to divine omnipotence with limited
human agency built in appears more consistent.
Indeed, this ambiguity in Arnaulds commitment to human agency calls
for careful consideration of what is really at stake in the notorious Arnauld
Malebranche debate. It is my contention that although Arnauld protests
throughout True and False Ideas that his focus is on the nature of ideas (and
48
Nicolas Malebranche
not their origin or cause), it is his conception of the active human intellect
that shapes his beliefs on what ideas must be like. In contrast, Malebranches
conception of the limited, finite human intellect vis--vis the infinite divine
intellect shapes his conception of what ideas must be like. For Arnauld, the
mind is wholly active, so its perceptions are acts/ideas that necessarily
represent objects. (This will be discussed in detail later.) For Malebranche,
the finite human intellect is too limited to contain ideas infinite in number
and character, so they must reside in the divine mind (see Chapter 4). Thus
the debate between the two priests/philosophers is more complex than it is
often presented to be: Arnauld and Malebranche are not simply fighting
over direct or indirect sensory perception; rather, they are fighting over the
proper way to characterize the human soul and its relation to God.8
I. Arnaulds Attack on the Vision in God

Arnauld wants to make ideas a property of the human mind, not something removed from us that God must deign to reveal. In contrast to
Malebranches doctrine of the vision in Godwith its ideas as representations distinct from perceptionsArnauld claims that the soul is
essentially active and ideas are its perceptions. As he states near the end
of On True and False Ideas:
It must be noted that our soul and matter are two simple beings (i.e., they
are not beings composed of two different natures, as man is) and that,
especially with regard to the soul, the diverse faculties which we consider
in it are not really distinct things, but the same being differently considered. Therefore to assert that the soul is active with regard to one of its
faculties, the will, is to assert that it is active absolutely and by its nature.9
Yet the question Arnauld poses to Malebranche, of why he made the minds
inclinations active but its understanding passive, is one that could also be
posed of Descartes.10 Granted, Descartes made ideas modifications of the
human, not the divine, intellect. But Descartes also made the understanding a passive faculty that received information from the outside world
in the form of sensory stimulation or from God in the form of innately
given ideas.11 As Descartes writes to Mesland in May 1644: I regard the
difference between the soul and its ideas as the same as that between a
piece of wax and the various shapes it can take. Just as it is not an activity
but a passivity in the wax to take various shapes, so, it seems to me, it is a
49
passivity in the soul to receive one or other idea, and only its volitions are
activities.12
Descartes did, however, develop a theory of a faculty of pure intellect
whereby the human mind did have the power to retrieve those divinely
implanted ideas and discover fundamental metaphysical truths, such as the
nature of mind, matter, and even of God. And since those ideas are innate
to the human mind, in a sense humans depend only on God for the map to
truth, but take the journey themselves. Arnauld wants to reinforce this view
of the human mind as an active, powerful explorer in both the material and
metaphysical realms. In this spirit, he declares that he will prove geometrically the falsity of Malebranches representative beings and proceeds to
do so by offering several definitions attesting to the souls active nature and
ideas as its perceptions/modifications.13 Arnauld appears to believe that
these principles are clear and distinct notions, which all attentive thinkers
can intuit, for he offers no argument for his definitions.
In definition two, for example, he baldly states that To think, to know, to
perceive, are the same thing.14 Definition three stipulates that ideas are
modifications of mind, and definition six points out that our having an idea
in our mind is the same thing as our having a perceptiontwo claims that
are at the heart of his debate with Malebranche, and that certainly need
argumentation. Simply from the fact that the mind purportedly possesses
perceptions of objects by its very nature, it does not automatically follow
that these perceptions must belong to it as active modifications or as its
ideas. This conception of ideas as modifications of our minds naturally
grows out of Arnaulds prior commitment to the mind as active intellect. As
Nadler describes it, [t]he mind, for Arnauld, does not receive ideas; it is not
passive with regard to its cognitive functions (as Arnauld felt Malebranche
made it.) It perceives, it acts. These acts, being modifications of the soul,
are just the soul existing in such-and-such a manner.15
Having an idea and having a perception are the same for Arnauld, since
they are just a single modification of the mind that is related differently to
the thinker and to the object thought of:
Nevertheless it must be noted that this thing, although only one, has two
relations: one to the soul which it modifies, the other to the thing perceived insofar as it is objectively in the soul; and that the word perception
indicates more directly the first relation and the word idea the second. So
the perception of a square indicates more directly my soul as perceiving a
square and the idea of a square indicates more directly the square insofar
as it is objectively in my mind.16
50
Nicolas Malebranche
This notion of objective presence is central to Arnaulds explanation of

the active minds power of knowing, versus Malebranches passive understanding receiving ideas.
Arnauld takes himself to be merely elaborating on Descartes well-known
distinction between ideas qua mental modifications and ideas qua representative entities. As Descartes describes this distinction in the Third
Meditation:
Insofar as ideas are considered simply modes of thought, there is no recognizable inequality between them: they all appear to come from within
me in the same fashion. But insofar as different ideas are considered as
images which represent different things, it is clear that they differ widely.
Undoubtedly, the ideas that represent substances to me amount to something more and, so to speak, contain within themselves more objective
reality than the ideas that merely represent modes or accidents.17
As mental states, all ideas are equalthey have the same formal reality,
they are equally real. One modification of mind is not more of a modification than another. However, we may consider and compare the representative content of two ideas and here speak of one having greater
objective reality insofar as it is about something with a higher degree
of reality or perfection. Thus the idea that represents God has infinite
objective reality, whereas the idea that represents a square shape has a
slight objective reality, for the first represents and infinite substance and
the second a mere finite mode.18
In definition four Arnauld stipulates that an object is present to our
mind when our mind perceives and knows it.19 When my mind conceives
or perceives something, it is objectively present in my mind. And because
my mind can know objects in this way, Arnauld believes that Malebranches
representative ideas distinct from perception are superfluous.20 In stating
that the vision in God is based on a misunderstanding between physical and
intellectual vision, Arnauld is making more than a crude interpretation of
Malebranches walking mind argument as requiring literal local presence
for mental vision as for physical vision (though he undoubtedly does this
too); he is also attacking Malebranche for making intellectual vision passive
and in need of enlightenment by external ideas.21 Rather than a passive
mind being acted upon, Arnauld favors an active mind reaching out (so to
speak) to the world it seeks to know. To analyze in detail how Arnauld
explains the mind as an active knowing power, we must now consider his
account of the objective reality of ideas.
51
Objective being is so essential to Arnaulds conception of the intellect

that he states in his eighth definition that this way of being objectively in the
mind, is so peculiar to mind and to thought, being what in particular constitutes their nature, that we would look in vain for anything similar in the
realm of what is not mind and thought.22 Arnauld warns that we must not
try to understand this relation between objective presence in the mind
representing the external object on the model of a painting representing a
landscape or a word representing a thing: such an interpretation gets things
backward, for these representative relations in the world are understood in
relation to this more fundamental model of objective presence representing object, not vice-versa.
Further, it is important to note that objective being constitutes the very
nature of mind and thought; and Arnauld holds, as we have seen, that the
mind is wholly active. It seems fair to deduce, then, that objective being
must also be a form of activity on the part of the mind. Recall that for
Arnauld to think, to perceive, and to know are the same thing; further he
equates idea with perception. Indeed, Arnauld seems to eschew dependence
of the mind even on the external objects to which our perceptions appear
to relate us by claiming that when we conceive of an object it is objectively
in my mind whether or not it exists outside my mind.23
When we conceive an object, the perception/ideaalthough only one
modification or act of the soulis best described as a perception of the soul
it modifies and an idea of the object perceived as existing objectively in the
soul. The object perceived, then, is related to the soul in a primitive way
that Arnauld apparently believes cannot be further analyzed. This mystery
at the heart of Arnaulds explanation of the representative power of the
minds perceptual acts has caused his commentators much trouble. As
Daisie Radner succinctly describes the problem, Arnaulds account retains
an unanswered question, which may be put as follows: What is it about an
act of perceiving that makes it the act of perceiving a certain object and
not some other object?24 Radner mentions and dismisses explaining the
meaning of objective reality for Arnauld as a way of solving this mystery
of the idea/perceptions representational power. However, I believe that it
is a mistake to try and explain Arnaulds objective reality further: it defines
mind and thought, remember, and is clear to all who introspect.
Indeed, Arnauld himself claims that we should not seek an explanation
or formal cause for why we think of something, for it is clear when with each
thought we see the perception and knowledge of an objectthat is, the
objective reality or existence of the object in our idea. In other words,
although we can seek the reason why we perceive this or that objector
52
Nicolas Malebranche
what causes us to have this particular objective existence in cognitionwe

cannot seek to define further the objective relation itself that allows our
perception to represent objects in the first place. Arnauld explains the representative character of ideas by saying that what we conceive is objectively
in our minds:
The idea of the sun is the sun, insofar as it is in my mind, not formally as it is
in the sky, but objectively, i.e. in the way that objects are in our thought,
which is a way of being much more imperfect than that by which the sun
is really existent, but which nevertheless we cannot say is nothing and
does not need a cause.25
Objects exist in our minds as representative beings; objective reality explains
the representative nature of perception via the existence of an idea or mental object in our mind. Granted, Arnaulds twist on the passive Cartesian
understanding makes this idea mysteriously identical with or contained
within the act of perception. However, this activity does not destroy the
need Arnauld clearly saw for some kind of mental item to explain the
relation between our mind and the world.
As Kremer understands it, Arnaulds greatest concern was making
cognition immanent, so that it takes place entirely within the knower.26
Ideas represent what we conceive to us because the things we conceive
are objectively in our mind. As Kremer glosses this, we should think of
represent here like exhibit, for like exhibiting evidence in court or a
gallery exhibiting works of art: for If acts of cognition exhibit their objects
to the mind, then they must contain them.27 Kremer stresses that, for
Arnauld, the minds own cognition makes the object be present or exhibited in the mind; the object in the world does not exhibit itself to the mind,
or cognition would be divided between the mind and the world it perceives.
Again, when we conceive the sun this is merely an extrinsic denomination,
not an essential part of the suns beingthis implies, Kremer says, that the
object does not exhibit itself to the mind and supports his reading of cognition as totally immanent for Arnauld. What interests me more, however,
about Kremers account is the suggestion I find there of the objective reality
of our ideas as some kind of mental entities (otherwise there would be
nothing to be exhibited).
So whereas commentators such as Cooke lament that Arnaulds admiration for Descartes obscures the otherwise lucid presentation of an act
theory of ideas,28 Kremers account makes Arnaulds Cartesian explanation of objective reality central to understanding his theory of ideas. It is
53
precisely because of the existence of the things we conceive as objective

presences, so to speak, that we can know them through the explicit selfconsciousness that accompanies all reflection. Adhering to the Cartesian
claim of the transparency of thought, Arnauld claims that I do not know a
square without knowing that I know it . . . I do not fancy that I see the sun,
unless I am certain that I fancy I see it.29 The virtual self-consciousness that
accompanies all thought makes us aware of both our mental acts and their
objects. Through explicit reflection upon our thoughts we can gain further
knowledge about them, as in the sciences where we study our perception
of a triangle to derive the Pythagorean theorem. But as Kremer notes,
In both cases [or virtual or explicit self-consciousness], it is clear that selfconsciousness extends to the objects of cognition.30
As Kremer explains it, for Arnauld acts exhibit their objects by objectively
containing them; in turn, this objective presence is what allows us to know
our objects of cognitions through self-consciousness. Thus Arnauld chides
Malebranche that if he
had consulted himself and considered attentively what happens in his
own mind, he would have seen clearly there that he knows bodies, that he
knows a cube . . . To continue, if he had paused at this though, I know a
cube, I see the sun, in order to meditate upon it and to consider what is
clearly included in it . . . I am sure he could not have seen there anything
other than the perception of the cube, or the cube objectively present to
the mind, than the perception of the sun, or the sun objectively present
to the mind.31
In other words, Malebranche should have been able to grasp through introspection that it was the objective, representative reality of his ideas that
allowed him to perceive the sun or a cube, an objective reality that is both
the object of and contained in the act of perception.
Arnauld rejects Malebranches ideas outside the mind because they imply
a passivity and dependence on illumination from a source outside the mind.
He does not reject all forms of representation or representative entities, so
long as those representative entities are in our mind and made by our
minds activity. To wit, Arnauld does not reject the philosophical notion of
an idea as the objective reality immanent in our minds by which we see the
actual or possible bodies of the world. As Kremer comments, the doctrine
of objective existence specifies how cognition is supposed to be immanent
[takes place entirely in the knower]. This view of how cognition is immanent is the core of his philosophical notion of an idea.32 I would shift the
54
Nicolas Malebranche
emphasis here, however, to say that the doctrine of the objective reality of
our ideas explains how our cognition takes place within the knower, through
the activity of the knowers own mind. This view of how cognition is immanent and active is the core of Arnaulds philosophical notion of an idea.
The moral of the story on Arnauld and objective presence, then, is that
the souls immanent activity shapes Arnaulds conception of the nature of
ideas. Because the mind is wholly active, its consideration ofand sometimes even the causation ofits perceptual modifications must be active.
Arnauld considers viewing ideas qua mental modifications as both acts and
representations to be the genuine Cartesian position. And in the opinion of
those of us who read Descartes as a representationalist,33 he is not too far
off the mark. As Vere Chappell argues, the idea taken materially, qua act,
and the idea taken objectively, qua object of that act:
are not distinct entities at all-not one individual thing and then a second,
different onebut are rather one thing on the one hand, and an aspect
or component of that same thing on the other. The ideam [materially/
as an act] and the ideao [objectively/as a mental object] only differ
from one another, to use Descartes own expression, by a distinction of
reason.34
Arnauld stresses the activity of the mind vis--vis its own perceptual modifications; but here again, we must keep in mind that he was fighting what he
believed to be the unacceptable passivity of the Malebranchean intellect.
Arnaulds allegiance to a powerful, active mind explains why he abhorred
placing ideas outside us and in the mind of God; for him, this would push
past the fundamental debt we owe to God for creating our faculty of thought
to making us depend on God to do the thinking and perceiving for us: this
would make us mental mechanisms, no better than animals. As Arnauld
discusses in chapter 20, we can say that we depend on God for our enlightenment because He gave us the faculty of thought without being forced
to say that we see all things in God and depend on Him to illuminate our
passive understanding with his ideas.35
According to Arnauld, whatever the origin of our perceptions (innate,
adventitious, self-created), we do have perceptions and ideas in our mind.
So our fundamental nature as thinking, perceiving beings is available to all
who introspect the contents of their minds. The main issue, says Arnauld, is
not whether God, qua efficient cause, causes my perceptions of material
things, but whether or not the perceptions that I have of them are immanent, available to me because they are in me objectively or intelligibly,
55
because it is my nature to perceive and to think. These kinds of claim

ground his attack on Malebranches vision in God.
II. Malebranches Response to Arnaulds Challenge

In his 1684 Response of the Author of the Search After Truth Mr. Arnaulds book
On True and False Ideas, Malebranche gives a systematic, point-by-point
response to Arnaulds attack on the vision in God. Since this chapter aims
to contrast Arnaulds conception of the mind with Malebranches, I will
focus on Malebranches general counterattack on Arnaulds representative modalities of mind. We must first consider Arnaulds general claim
that Malebranche mixes up the mental and the material, body with mind,
in his account of sensory perception.
Malebranche accuses Arnauld of failing to read with charity his jest that
the soul does not stroll around the heavens to see the sun, the stars, and
other external objects: I claimed only, that there must be something different from the sun to represent it to the soul.36 Recall that Arnauld accused
Malebranche of mixing up physical and intellectual vision, of assuming that
the rules of spatial proximity apply in both cases. Malebranche is correct to
protest that a careful reading of the Search clearly suggests that he is not
making some kind of claim about literal distancehe is not worried that an
object must be on top or next to the mind or soul to be perceived.
Rather, Malebranche is worried about a metaphysical distance between
mind and body: given that external bodies are, by definition, material and
extended, and the soul is spiritual, mediation via immaterial ideas is necessary for the two substances to interact in perception: material things . . .
certainly cannot be joined to our soul in the way necessary for it to perceive
them, because with them extended and the soul unextended, there is no
relation between them.37 Thus Malebranche argues in the Search that for
the mind to perceive an object, it is absolutely necessary for the idea of that
object to be actually present to it.38
Further, ideas are in the mind of God, where they are eternal, immutable
archetypes for all created things:
God must have within Himself the ideas of all the beings He has created
(since otherwise He could not have created them), and thus He sees all
these beings by considering the perfections He contains to which they
are related. We should know, furthermore, that through His presence
God is in close union with out minds, such that He might be said to be the
56
Nicolas Malebranche
place of minds as space is, in a sense, the place of bodies. Given these two
things, the mind surely can see what in God represents created beings,
since what in God represents created beings is very spiritual, intelligible,
and present to the mind. Thus, the mind can see Gods works in Him,
provided that God wills to reveal to it what in Him represents them.39
With this kind of language, Malebranche adds to the ontological gap
between mind and body the more general moral of occasionalism that all
finite, created beings are both limited and powerless to act. Only God is
infinite, only He can contain all the perfections of both mind and body
needed to represent them. Further, only God has power, so only He can act
to modify mind with sensations or reveal to mind ideas.
For on Malebranches account of sense perception, recall, there are two
elements: (1) an intellectual component (the pure idea is God); and (2) a
sensory component (the sensation in us). The sensation is a modification of
our soul that is caused by God on the occasion of an external object coming
into contact with our body, which gives detail and particularizes the idea
of intelligible extension (the immutable, eternal archetype of all of the
natural world) contained in God.40 As Malebranche emphasizes in the
Response, this intelligible extension, to which the color refers and by which
it is made visible, is not at all a sentiment or modality of the soul. Because
all modalities are particular and this extension is general.41 I will return
later to Malebranches discussion of the souls finite modalities and their
relation to general and infinite ideas, for this discussion of the limitations
of the mind is the crux of the disagreement between Malebranche and
Arnauld. It is worth noting, however, that the vision in God is consistent
with Malebranches occasionalism: for causally impotent minds and bodies
cannot act on each other or themselves, thus God is the only candidate to
enlighten minds by acting upon them.
Malebranche links intelligibility to a mind with the ability to act upon
that mind. Thus he argues in the Response that:
only God can be visible, only He can be light, only the intelligible substance of universal Reason can penetrate minds and enlighten them by
His presence. I claim that one cannot without Him, nor outside of Him
find the truth, for which minds are made; like one cannot find without
Him, nor outside of Him the good, necessary end of all the movements of
our wills . . . Likewise, the mind sees [voir] only God, although it looks at
[regarder] sensible objects, as the subject and cause of its knowledge.
God made minds to see Him [voir] as well as our hearts to love Him.42
57
God, the infinitely perfect being, can only act for Himself, as He is the only
end worthy of Himself. Whether aware of it or not, when minds see ideas in
God that represent His creation, they are seeing (part of) Him, even as
whether they realize it or not, when minds love particular beings via the
general attraction toward the good that God impresses upon them, they are
loving Him as well. Considerations of order thus determine that the only
possible end for human minds and hearts is God qua truth and goodness.
Similar considerations of the divine attributes, which reveal that only
between the divine will and effect is there a necessary connection, determine that only God has causal powerthus only God can act on minds
to enlighten them with both sensory and intellectual perception. As
Malebranche comments in the Search nothing can act immediately
upon the mind unless it is superior to itnothing but God alone; for only
the Author of our being can change its modifications . . . the efficacious
substance of the Divinity . . . alone is intelligible or capable of enlightening
us, because it alone can affect intelligences.43
Arnauld had asserted that if we only see via ideas in the mind of God,
if only God is visible because only He is intelligible, then the mind is
imprisoned in a world of ideas. He mocked Malebranche for divinizing
corporeal things with his account of the vision in God: women who idolize
themselves in the mirror, then, are really idolizing God since they are
admiring an intelligible face! Malebranche turns this criticism back on
Arnauld, by pointing out that Arnauld, too, relies on mediation between
mind and world in visual perception:
When one sees a woman, isnt it the color of her face that makes her
visible, and if there is no color, can we see her? Now, according to
Mr. Arnauld, the color isnt in the woman, it is a modification of the soul.
Thus, according to this reasoning, no man ever saw or loved a woman.
Because one only loves what one sees; and if one only sees color or
colored extension, which is only a modality of the soul.44
Whether one interprets Arnaulds objective realities as representative
mental objects (as Malebranche does) or as acts structuring the mind to the
world (as Nadler recently has done),45 Malebranches point stand; if Arnauld
believes in any kind of mental mediation in visual perception, then his
account is vulnerable to the same criticism that he makes of Malebranche.
If objective realities or idea/perceptions are what bring us into perceptual contact with the worldif the im/mediate perception distinction
holdsthen skeptical doubts about whether we have successfully bridged
58
Nicolas Malebranche
the gap between mind and world can creep in. Indeed, as Malebranche
mocks Arnauld in return:
Perhaps one might also, to embarrass Mr. Arnauld, tell him that God
does nothing useless, and that it is useless to create bodies, since bodies
do not act at all on minds, and properly speaking, the mind does not
see bodies at all, but according to him, the representative modalities of
bodies which God causes, or can cause in souls, without there being
a single body.46
Malebranche makes this point to defend his claim that the existence of the
created world cannot be demonstrated; since the world is not a necessary
emanation from God, we cannot deduce the necessary connection between
this truth and its principle needed for such a proof. For our purposes, the
moral of Malebranches point is that since Arnauld does not think that his
representative modalities (as a means to perception) fail explanatorily
because they mediate between us and the external world, he cannot reject
Malebranchean ideas for doing the same. Malebranche does not think that
the problem is mediation per se,47 but that Arnaulds perception/ideas are
not up to the job. More specifically, the human mind and its modifications
possess neither the power nor the reality needed for even mere sensory
perception.
This focus on the limited human mind versus the unlimited, infinite
divine mind shapes the controversy between Malebranche and Arnauld.
Arnauld attacked the passivity and limitation of the Malebranchean mind,
using the purported mix-up between the mental and the material as his
weapon. Malebranche denies that he mixes up the mental and the material
and counter-charges that Arnauld mixes up the human and the divine.
Malebranche rejects Arnaulds essentially representative modalities of
mind because he rejects the conception of the soul as capable of having
infinite or general modifications, the claim that the finite could represent
the infinite. Malebranche argues that I deny that one can have perception
which represents to the mind a being distinguished from it without ideas. It
is this alone that is in question.48 The souls own modifications can only
represent its self, its sensations, or feelings. But the soul does not have
enough reality or representational capacity to represent all beings.
As discussed in Chapter 1, Malebranche argues in the Search that we are
at all times capable of thinking of all beings. In the Response he echoes this
claim that the mind can see all beings, even infinite onesand not merely
in temporal succession, but it even perceives (without comprehending) the
59
infinite. But the mind is neither actually infinite nor capable of infinite
modifications simultaneously, [so] it is absolutely impossible for the mind
to see in itself what is not there.49 Malebranche is startingas Arnauld
continually admonishes him to dofrom an introspectively discovered fact
about his mind: that he perceives the infinite. From this fact he argues that
the essential pre-conditions for this fact must be either that (1) I am
actually infinite (which is false), or that (2) I possess infinite simultaneous
modifications (also false because of my finite nature), or that (3) I see the
infinite idea in an actually infinite being. Point (3) is the only non-absurd
answer. A modification is just a way of being of a substance, according
to Malebranche; and a finite being cannot have an infinite modification.
Likewise, a particular being cannot have a general modification; so the
general idea of a circle or triangle cannot be a modification of the
soul either.
The particular, finite soul cannot see the general or the infinite in itself
cannot see what is not there. Daisie Radner explains Malebranches
reasoning as follows:
Malebranche proves that nothing finite can represent the infinite from
the principle that nothing is not visible or that to see nothing is not to
see. His argument may be summarized as follows. In order for one thing
X to be able to represent another thing Y, Y must be perceivable in X.
And in order for Y to be perceivable in X, it must in some manner be
contained in X. For were it not contained in X, we would, in perceiving it
in X, perceive what was not there, or rather, we would perceive nothing.
But to perceive nothing is not to perceive. Thus only that which a thing
contains can be perceived in it. Now we cannot perceive three realities in
that which has only two, for then we would perceive one which was not in
it. Likewise, we cannot perceive the infinite in anything that is finite, for
then we would perceive an infinite which was not there. Since the infinite
is not in any way contained in the finite, it is not perceivable in the finite,
and hence the finite cannot represent it.50
Recall that for Arnauld it is on account of the minds containing or exhibiting the objective reality of objects that his act/ideas can represent external
objects. In response, Malebranche denies that finite modifications can
contain or exhibit certain kinds of objects. For the finite to represent the
infinite it would have to contain it, or, as Radner points up, we would
perceive something that was not thereand, for Malebranche, to see
nothing is not to see.
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Nicolas Malebranche
Indeed, as Malebranche sees it, Arnauld has reversed things: for it is the
infinite that contains the finite, thus allowing us to see finite objects:
But not only does the mind have the idea of the infinite, it even has it
before that of the finite. For we conceive of infinite beings simply because
we conceive of being, without thinking whether it is finite or infinite. In
order for us to conceive of a finite being, something must necessarily be
eliminated from this general notion of being, which consequently must
come first. Thus, the mind perceives nothing except in the idea it has
of the infinite, and far from this idea being formed from the confused
collection of all our ideas of particular beings (as philosophers think), all
these particular ideas are in fact but participations in the general ideas of
the infinite; just as God does not draw His being from creatures, while
every creature is but an imperfect participation in the divine being.51
We do not grasp the limitless by adding together our perceptions of the
limited, just as we cannot form a general idea capable of representing all
triangles, for example, from the confused amalgam of our various experiences of particular triangles. Malebranche is arguing that the idea of the
infinite is logically prior to that of the finitewe grasp the finite by realizing it falls short of the infinite. It is because the infinite contains the finite
that we can find it in considering the former.
Malebranche also faults Arnauld for falsely assuming that a limited mind
and its purportedly representative perceptual modalities could be the
source of eternal practical or speculative truths. Malebranche argues that it
is because intelligible extension and numbers, for example, are in the
divine reason (and not finite human minds) that they are eternal and
immutable. This immutability and timelessness assure us that when you and
I contemplate the Pythagorean theorem, we contemplate the same truth.
The idea of extension is general and always the same: it can be seen by all
minds, because effectively intelligible extension, as well as numbers, are
not at all created and particular beings.52 My perception is merely a modification of me and yours of you; but we share the same object of perception
and so we contemplate the same idea and can discover the same truths
about the relations between different aspects of this idea. For Arnauld, on
the other hand, it is in contemplating my perception/ideathe objective
reality that is a modification of my beingthat I discover truths about the
object my perceptual modalities purportedly represent. But all my modalities are particular to me; how can I be sure that your truth is my truth?53
Only if we perceive the same ideas can we trust that our words share similar
61
meanings; as David Scott has argued, in this sense occasionalism [God

acting to reveal the same ideas to different human minds] is a causal
doctrine that serves as the basis of rational discourse among people.54
As Malebranche comments, only placing infinite, eternal ideas in the
divine reason can secure a shared, objective truth for all minds:
It is very clear . . . that this unique truth that we both see each by our
mind, is common to each of us. But the modalities of minds are particular
to them. Thus it must be that ideas, or truths, which are only the relations
between ideas, are other than our proper modalities. There must be an
immutable and universal nature that communicates itself to all minds,
without dividing itself among them, which is, as St. Augustine says, miris
modis secretum et publicum lumen. [in a miraculous way is (both) a
hidden and public light]55
A limited human mind cannot contain or secure the eternal, immutable
ideas necessary for a shared objective foundation for science, religion, and
morality. Arnaulds desire for an active, independent intellect possessing
essentially representative modalities undercuts the stability of a stable
epistemology and religion. Mr. Arnauld claims that the truths that one sees
only exist in the mind of he who sees them, that one makes numbers by
abstractions and that the idea of extension is a chimera which only exists in
my mind.56
Malebranche argues that these errors stem from Arnaulds misconception that God gave us an active faculty to modify ourselves with perceptual
representations. Arnauld mistakenly thinks that claiming our nature is to
think implies a power on our part to enlighten ourselves. Arnauld grants
that we depend on God to give us this power or faculty originally, but
he thinks that afterward we can turn to our own modifications to discover
the truth:
In a word, according to Mr. Arnauld, to discover the truth, whatever it
may be, or at least to have the idea of God present to the mind, one needs
God to modify our soul by his power: but one has no need that God
enlighten it by his wisdom; because, according to him, although man is
not the cause of his own light, his own modalities are really and formally
a light, which reveals and represents to the mind creatures and the
Creator, the finite and the infinite, what the mind is and all that is known
to it, and this by this admirable reason, not at all held up by prejudices,
that the mind has the FACULTY of thinking and that this is its nature.57
62
Nicolas Malebranche
Arnauld admits, recall, that some ideassuch as that of Godmay have

been implanted in him by God; so the origin of the idea comes from Gods
power. Yet Arnauld claims that we do possess the idea of God, that we have
an Arnauldian perceptionidea of God as one of our representational
modalities. This, as Malebranche sees it, is to argue that our own modalities
are really our light, since we draw from our own mind and not from Gods
the content of this idea when we consider it: in the end the idea of God is
only, according to Mr. Arnauld, the proper modality of his soul.58 Likewise,
even if Arnauld might grant that the idea we have of the infinite is innate,
he makes this idea a modification of our mind, and thus again our mind
becomes the source of our enlightenment.
Malebranche has argued, however, that a limited, particular being such
as our soul could not be the source of our knowledge of the general, the
infinite, of all beings. Careful introspection reveals that we possess knowledge greater than can be contained in our limited minds. Malebranche
opposes Arnaulds focus on a fully active mind with a focus on the
limitations of our finite mind. He also points out, with justification, that
the definitions Arnauld uses to demonstrate his claim about the nature
of ideas already include the essential claims that our ideas just are our perceptions and that our perceptions are essentially representative modalities
of our minds. The issue being debated is whether or not the mind has the
capacity to represent all things and whether its knowledge depends ultimately on ideas in Gods or our own minds: Arnauld thus cannot simply
presuppose his preferred answers in his definitions.
Malebranche claims that Arnauld proceeds as he does in On True and
False Ideas precisely because he does not have clear knowledge of the soul
(despite his protests to the contrary):
It would be much desired, that Mr. Arnauld, who glorifies himself as
having an idea of the soul, as clear as those of the geometers have of
extension, bring us these proofs, that the modalities of the soul are
essentially representative, as good and as short, as those that one can give,
that roundness is nothing other than a modification of matter; he would
assuredly convince all the world of his belief. But it is strange, that all that
he says about this is just pure begging of the question, to which nonetheless, as a geometer, he gives a certain geometrical flourish, with which
I doubt other geometers would be satisfied.59
Malebranche is clearly implying that if Arnauld really had a clear and
distinct idea of his soul, he could prove that it contained essentially
63
representative modalities, as geometers can prove from the clear idea of

extension that it contains a circle, a square, and so on. Arnauld does not
do this because, in fact, he does not have such an idea. So he hides his
ignorance behind definitions that beg the question.
On Malebranches account, when one knows something by its idea, one
can discover by contemplating its idea what it includes and what it excludes:
and when one applies oneself to contemplating its general properties, one
can discover its particular properties to infinity (i.e., like we can discover
an infinity of figures by contemplating the clear idea of extension).60 I can
also see by contemplating the idea of extension that it excludes thought,
for example, because all the properties of extension are based of relations
of distance, and thought obviously is not so based. In contrast, when I am
aware of something by sentimentby feeling or by sensationI am intimately aware that this thing exists, but ignorant of what it is.61
According to Malebranche, introspection reveals that our knowledge of
the soul is from sentiment and not from an idea:
I do not know the soul at all, neither in general, nor my own in particular,
by its idea. I know that I exist, that I think, that I desire, because I sense
myself. I am more certain of the existence of my soul than that of my
body; this is true. But I do not know at all what my thought, my desire, my
pain are . . . we do not know our nature at all, its grandeur, and its virtue:
and we even only know it when it is excited; because we only know it by
interior feeling. We can not discover whether the soul is or is not capable
of pleasure, in contemplating the pretended idea that represents it; it is
the feeling or experience that teaches it to us in a confused and not at all
intelligible manner. There are no figures that the idea of extension does
not present to those who seek them. But we can consult ourselves as much
as we like; we will see neither what we are, nor any of the modalities of
which we are capable.62
Consciousness reassures us that we exist, but tells us nothing of our
nature. With this claim Malebranche differentiates his position from
Descartes as well as from Arnaulds: he rejects the reasoning that because
self-awareness accompanies all mental operations this means we know our
soul best of all, better even than body. Rather, it means we are certain of the
souls existence in a way that we cannot be sure of the bodys. However, the
clear and distinct idea of extension affords us knowledge of bodys nature
that our sentiment of the mind never could. [E]xtension can not be known
in the modalities of the soul, which are only shadows, but by the clear idea
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Nicolas Malebranche
that we have of it in the immutable and illuminating nature of the truth

[i.e., in God], which encloses the archetype of all bodies.63
Indeed, it is not only because our modalities are necessarily particular
and finite that they cannot represent the general and the infinite, but also
that our ignorance of their nature renders them unsuitable to represent
the clear and distinct. According to Malebranche, such claims push
Arnaulds position into absurdity:
Saint Augustine, as I have shown in Chapter VII, holds that one can only
discover in God any truth, a number, a circle, in a word, all that is intelligible. And Mr. Arnauld, who calls himself a disciple of this great saint,
wants to find in the modalities of the soul which are only shadows and
confused feeling, the representative of the infinitely perfect Being: the
most luminous, fecund and necessary idea that we have: that in which
one can discover all the principles of our knowledge and all the rules of
our conduce, provided that scorning our own modalities, we contemplate
it in the silence of our senses, imagination, and passions.64
It was bad enough when Arnauld claimed to find the infinite and the general in his finite, particular modalities; when he claims to find there the
infinitely infiniteGodMalebranche says that Arnauld offends both reason and religion.
And since ideas from a circle in general to infinite extension to God Himself cannot belong to the soul, so to speak, we could never find them
inside of ourselves or form ideas of them based on information we do possess, because we would not know what we were looking for. This problem of
having to know what you seek before you can find it is as old as Platos Meno.
Malebranche thinks that his account is superior to Arnaulds in solving this
paradox. As he explains, I can:
desire, to say thus, to see up close that which I see only from afar; and that
the movement by which the mind approaches particular ideas, or rather
than the occasional cause of the presence of ideas, is attention . . . Now this
sentiment is very different from that of Mr. Arnauld, or of those who
think that the mind has a faculty to form its ideas: and the reasoning that
I make against his sentiment, doesnt touch mine at all. It suffices to know
something confusedly, in consequence of the laws that unite the mind
with Reason. But it does not suffice to have a confused or general idea, to
have the power to form a distinct and particular idea of it: because one
cannot make a better copy than its exemplar.65
65
We do not have the power to form our ideas or modify ourselves with
representative perceptions. Indeed, we could not form them without prior
knowledge of what we wanted to represent (and then the ideas would be
redundant). On Malebranches account, of course, we are joined to the
divine infinite mind, which contains the perfections of all beings. Access to
the divine Reason thus means that we can at all times think of all things,
because, in essence, we are always already in contact with the perfections
that represent them or serve as their archetypes (like intelligible extension
is the archetype for all material things).
Malebranche argues that the interior sentiment or awareness that we
have of ourselves teaches us that we can in fact desire to know things of
which we currently only have an obscure perception. As an example, he
notes that even though I may not know what number squared equals forty,
I can form a desire to know this.66 According to Malebranche, Arnauld has
misunderstood what it means to say that we have a God-given faculty of
thought: he thinks that this means that the mind is fundamentally active
and can give itself representative perceptions up to and including the
divine. In truth, however, the only power we possess is the God-given
power to focus our attention by forming desires for greater knowledge.
Malebranche explains:
Because those who are well convinced, that our faculty of thinking, or of
knowing the truth, only consists in our wills having been established as
natural or occasional causes of the presence of ideas in consequence of
the general laws of the union of the mind with universal Reason; the same
as we have the faculty to move our members only because our wills were
established as occasional causes of their movements, in consequence of
the general laws of the union of the soul and the body. These, I say, who
are convinced of this Metaphysics will be horrified at this division that
Mr. Arnauld made with God [where he suggests that although he owes
some of his ideas to God, the soul might give itself others].67
Malebranche rejects the powerful Arnauldian mind. He replaces the purported God-given ability to give ourselves perceptual modifications with the
God-given ability to focus our attention.68 In so doing, he escapes certain
problems about how the mind could represent certain things, such as the
infinite, or how this power works. He introduces, unfortunately, his own set
of new metaphysical problems: (1) how do ideas mediate between our
mind and the external world, thereby representing the latter to the former;
(2) what is the ontological status of these ideas; and (3) how do our minds
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Nicolas Malebranche
participate in divine Reason and how do they occasion or bring about

his union? These are the problems of the next chapter, which examines
Malebranches considered doctrine of the vision in God as an account of
both sensory and intellectual perception and what room this account leaves
for human freedom.
Although many scholars, notably Steven Nadler, have focused on the
vision in God as an explanation for sensory perception, I will focus on
examining the vision in God as an explanation of our intellectual perception. We are passive in sensory perception, but in intellectual perception
human activity plays a crucial role. Human freedom stems from this power
of attention, or focusing our desires, which serves as the occasional cause of
our union with divine reason. This activity plays a vital role in Malebranches
metaphysical system, as it accounts not only for human freedom but also
for our ability to gain the intellectual/spiritual enlightenment that is
the ultimate goal (according to Malebranche) of both philosophy and
religion.
Chapter 4
The Union of the Divine and the

Human Minds
But whatever effort of mind I make, I cannot find an idea of force, efficacy, of
power, save in the will of the infinitely perfect Being
Malebranche OC III 205
One of the signatures of seventeenth-century rationalists is their replacement

of the Scholastics dependence on the deliverances of the senses with a
dependence on the deliverances of the intellect as the key to gaining knowledge.1 Correct use of the intellect leading to freedom from the passions
and to certain knowledge figures prominently in the works of Spinoza and
Leibniz. Descartes Meditations uses skeptical doubt to withdraw the mind
from the senses, and his reliance on the meditative genre not only reveals
to his readers the intellect as a distinct source of knowledge, but also trains
them to use properly their will or faculty of judgment. Commentators have
argued persuasively that overthrowing the sense-based epistemology and
metaphysics of the Aristotelians depended on discovering the primacy of
ones intellect over the senses, and using the deliverances of the mind to
establish solid foundations for a new metaphysics and epistemology.2
Indeed, outlining the proper use of the minds faculties arguably lay at the
basis of the Cartesian program in particular. This importance can be seen
in Arnauld and Nicoles influential Port-Royal Logic, which aimed at training
its readers in the proper use of the intellect.3
Few would question Nicolas Malebranches inclusion in the rationalist
tradition.4 For while Malebranche famously takes ideas out of the Cartesian
mind and transports them to Godsthus privileging the divine over the
natural lighthe shares Descartes belief that our intellect, not our senses,
holds the key to metaphysical truths such as the essence of matter, the
mindbody distinction, and the existence of God.5 Yet, recently, Nicholas
Jolley has contended that Malebranches later commitment to efficacious
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Nicolas Malebranche
ideas undermines his earlier belief in the power of the cognitive faculties:
he believes that Malebranche abandons his view that the mind makes real
use of the intellect to know intelligible objects. Jolleys position builds
upon Alqui and Robinets claims that around 169495 Malebranche
moved from a vision in God to a vision by God. Now Gods ideas act on
and modify the soul with both sensations and intellectual concepts, rather
than the human intellect contemplating ideas in the Divine Reason.6
Alqui and Robinet argue that Malebranche, pushed by the battles with
Arnauld and Rgis over the status of ideas, introduced the language of
efficacious ideas to explain how the union of the human and the divine
mind is supposed to work.7 Robinet in particular suggests that in cashing
out the metaphor of God enlightening human minds, Malebranche moved
from a static ontologist view of ideaobjects in God to an active illuminationist view whereby divine ideas cause (intellectual and sensory) perception by modifying the soul.8 Once one accepts this view of the place and
function of efficacious ideas in Malebranches metaphysics, it seems natural
to accept Jolleys declaration that the only way for the mind to apprehend
ideas in God is if those ideas act directly on the mind; [if] they thereby
cause cognitive states to arise in a substance which is devoid of all genuine
cognitive capacities of its own.9 Indeed, Jolley suggests that Malebranche ultimately made the soul passive in all its states, including its volitional ones.10
In this chapter, I argue that a strong interpretation of efficacious
ideas, whereby they appear to become true causal agents, must be rejected
precisely because it pushes us into an incorrect reading of Malebranches
theory of the divine and human faculties. Making ideas causal true agents
within God privileges divine reason at the expense of the divine will,
and nullifies the role of the human faculties. Making ideas qua ideas causally active violates both the strictures of Malebranches occasionalist
metaphysics and his substancemode ontology. Additionally, denying
Malebranches commitment to the souls cognitive and volitional capacities makes it impossible to understand the belief in human intellectual
and moral agency that motivated much of Malebranches work. Indeed,
denying Malebranches commitment to the real use of the intellect effectively places him outside the rationalist tradition. I shall argue that not
only does Malebranche believe that the mind has knowing powers, but
also that his specific conception of our wills attention or ability to desire
and thereby occasion further knowledge renders causally efficacious ideas
superfluous.
I begin by arguing that confusion about the ontology of divine ideas
allows a strong reading of them as efficacious agents, rendering the
69
human intellect and will irrelevant to the union with divine Reason. Next,
I discuss other critics grounds for attributing a strong doctrine of efficacious
ideas to Malebranche and analyze some of their and Jolleys evidence for
this position. I argue that careful analysis of God qua efficacious substance
defuses the appeal of this interpretation. Building upon this discussion,
I sketch an alternative account of the status of the divine ideas and their relation to the human mind. Finally, I develop a picture of the Malebranchean
mind in which God establishes human attention, not efficacious ideas, as
the bridge between the human and the divine mind. This view preserves
Malebranches theological commitments, for our real use of the intellect
and proper use of the will are the key to honoring the God whose divine
image these faculties reflect. Malebranche, like his fellow rationalists, aimed
to reform metaphysics and epistemology with a program of training his
readers to focus their intellectual vision and thereby escape error and gain
enlightenment. For Malebranches Christian rationalism, the minds attention is nothing other than its return and conversion towards God, who is
our only Master and who alone instructs us in all truth by the manifestation
of his substance.11
I. The Ontological Status of Ideas

Malebranche argues that we perceive external bodies and have intellectual
perceptions by way of our contact with eternal, immutable ideas
contained in the divine being. God is thus the only light of the mind, the
source of all our knowledge. Two puzzles about this position trouble
commentators: (1) the ontological question of what it means for God to
contain ideas; and (2) the problem of explaining the causal relations
between God and human beings when they apprehend ideas. Before the
latter problem can be solved, the question of the ontological status of
Gods ideas must be answered: for mistakes about the place of Gods
ideas engender errors about their function in human sensory and intellectual perception.
According to Malebranche, the ontological division of substance and
mode is exhaustive. Indeed, this way of conceiving reality constrains our
conceptual abilities: all that exists can be conceived on its own, or it cannot.
There is no middle ground, for these two propositions are contradictory.12
Yet the Search after Truth Malebranche asserts both: (1) that he can accept
that ideas are spiritual items while denying that they are substances13; and
(2) that God is not capable of being modified.14 Modes, in describing ways
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Nicolas Malebranche
that substances are, describe limitations of that substance: the paper is black
or white, but cannot be both, for example. God, however, contains all ideas
without any of them limiting or circumscribing his Being.15 The infinite
being, unlike other substances, does not possess modifications. If ideas are
not modes, however, it would appear that they must be substances (the only
other ontological category available).
However, in his Three Letters to Arnauld (written 1685/revised 1709)
Malebranche notes that God is composed of an infinity of perfections, not
made up of substances.16 God, the being without restriction, cannot be
limited either by being modified or by being made up of a collection of
substances.17 As Malebranche explains this point in his final work, On
Physical Premotion (1715): In the infinite, in the true Being, there is no
nothingness, no limitation, and by consequence no modification. He is all
that He is, in all that He is. God certainly encloses in His essence the ideas
of all that He made.18 Malebranche appears to be caught in a contradiction, holding both that everything that exists must be a substance or mode,
and that ideas are neither. Ideas are in God without modifying Him or
existing as independent substances. So what are they?
Commentators from Malebranches time to the present have dealt with
this puzzle by accusing Malebranche of introducing a new kind of entity
into his ontology, or by arguing that he should have posited such an entity,
eschewing the Cartesian ontology, but rendering his own metaphysics more
consistent.19 In a recent article, Jolley offers an account of the divine ideas
that turns them into third-realm entitiesand consequently solves the
problem of their ontological status (although the latter concern does not
figure in his argument).20 Jolley supports his claim by arguing that later in
his career, Malebranche abandoned all talk of mental faculties such as
intellect and will, and came to hold that the mind was passive in all its
states.21 Jolley uses this interpretation of Malebranche to buttress his
claim that starting with The Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion (1688), the
Oratorian advocated a theory of casually efficacious divine ideas to fill in
the void left from stripping the mind of all cognitive capacities, bringing
about a need for something outside the human mind to explain the union
between the divine and human reason.
On Jolleys account, Malebranche explains the union between the human
intellect and Gods Reason needed in both intellectual and sensory perception in terms of efficacious divine ideas acting upon our minds. Gods ideas,
not God himself, become true causes on this schema. Rather than God
revealing aspects of His substance as representative of creatures, Jolley
makes ideas as individual entities causally efficacious. As Jolley describes it,
71
to say that a mental state intends an idea is to say that the mental state is
the effect of the idea.22 In other words, a mental state is of or about an idea
because that idea causes the mental state; so the idea of a triangle, for
example, causes my intellectual perception of a triangle.
Malebranche always held that divine ideas are the intellects immediate
objects. However, Jolley claims that, starting with the Dialogues, Malebranche
makes acting on the mind a necessary and sufficient condition for somethings being the minds immediate object.23 Jolley extends his claim to say
that Malebranches ultimate view is that all mental states, including both
sensations and intellectual perceptions, result from efficacious ideas acting
on the mind.24 Jolley explicates both the role of the divine ideas and
the relation between God and human beings in perception by positing
ideas as a special class of entity that exists in God as neither substance nor
mode, and acts upon the inert human mind. Yet in addition to violating
Malebranches commitment to a substancemode ontology, this view undermines his Occasionalist theory of causation whereby only God Himself is a
true cause. Surely only a catastrophic flaw in his philosophical system would
lead Malebranche to revise his metaphysical system to this extent. The next
section turns to critics theories about what problems a doctrine of causally
active ideas might solve for Malebranche.
II. Efficacious Ideas: Motivations and Problems

As mentioned briefly earlier, Arnauld and Rgis challenged Malebranche
to explain how our alleged union with God worked: what happens in the
soul when it perceives pure ideas in God? Alqui notes that as Malebranche
struggles to explain how our mind can perceive external ideas, he adds
and sometimes even substitutes for the theory according to which we
contemplate ideas in the Word, the affirmation that we are affected and
thus modified by ideas and by intelligible extension itself.25 The relation
between causality and visibility is precisely the crux of the problem.
Material bodies cannot modify minds, not only because they are metaphysically distant and share no common attributes with them,26 but more
importantly because they are causally inert and thus cannot act on minds at
all.27 So if Malebranche did hold that ideas in God were inert, then ideas
would also seem unable to act on or enlighten minds.
Thus Robinet and Tad Schmaltz argue that in order to address worries
about how the divine Reason enlightens minds in the vision in God,
Malebranche exchanged ideas as inert objects that we see in God for ideas
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Nicolas Malebranche
as actively modifying the soul in both intellectual and sensory perception.28

Malebranches changed viewpoint is evident, according to Robinet, in his
new vocabulary: the terminology that concerns the possibility of the reception of the idea by the soul becomes dynamic.29 Friends of efficacious ideas
focus on the kinds of examples to which we now turn.
Jolley emphasizes passages such as the one in the Dialogues where
Malebranches mouthpiece Theodore says that the idea of a hand, by
affecting us in different ways, acts on and modifies our soul with various
sensations.30 Jolley fails to note, however, that in the very same passage
Malebranche corrects this statement to reflect the fact that, speaking with
metaphysical rigor, only God acts on us here:
Therefore, it is the idea or archetype of bodies that diversely affects us.
I mean to say, it is the intelligible substance of Reason that acts in our
mind by its all-powerful efficacy and which touches and modifies it with
color, taste, pain, by that within it which represents bodies.31
God qua Reason contains the idea of intelligible extension, and He renders
a portion of this idea of extension sensible and particular through the
sensations with which He modifies our minds.
Jolley is correct to emphasize that Malebranche does not hold that ideas
are either Gods whole substance, or themselves substances; and they are
not modes. Instead, they are something different from Gods whole
substance, from substances, and from modes; they are Gods way of acting
to reveal a limited portion of His essence.32 So Jolley is wrong in trying to
make ideas into some third class of things, efficacious ideas. When an idea
affects us or acts upon us, God is acting on us by or through those
aspects of His being that serve to represent His creation to human beings.
As will be discussed later, ideas are, strictly speaking, limited aspects of
Gods essence with which He affects us. The first is merely shorthand for
the second.33 The fact that our finite mind can only perceive a limited aspect
of God, however, does not entail a real distinction or existing entity in
God.34 The limited portion of Gods essence that our intellect can grasp
results from our own inadequate conceptual capacity, not from the
existence of distinct conceptual entities in God.
Further, Jolleys quote comes from the Fifth Dialogue; and it is not until
the Seventh Dialogue that Malebranche expounds fully his doctrine of
occasionalism. By casting this work in dialogue form, Malebranche slowly
weans both Aristes (the initially nave interlocutor) and his readers away
from dependence on the senses for knowledge. Just as Descartes Meditations
73
were designed to serve as what Hatfield has called cognitive exercises,35

Malebranches Dialogues train his readers to leave behind reliance on the
senses and imagination and instead to use their faculties of intellect in
order to attain true and certain knowledge. Malebranche slowly prepares
his readers for the proof that only God is a true cause. Before this proof is
given in the Seventh Dialogue, Malebranche has not precisely explained
what can and cannot act as a true cause.
Malebranche does contribute to the confusion on this issue by being
imprecise in his usage of language about ideas.36 He often speaks of ideas as
acting on our mind. At his most precise, however, he does qualify these
kinds of statements with reminders that God is the only causal agent, that
God operates on us by revealing the ideas He encloses. Alqui also admits
that Malebranches failure to distinguish clearly between efficacious ideas
and God acting through His ideas adds to the interpretive muddle.37 Yet
Alqui clarifies that Malebranche retains the more precise explanation that
God qua divine agent with reason and will acts through the means of His
ideas when He enlightens usthe ideas themselves do not do so. As
Alqui explains this, that which affects me is not the Word or Reason, but
only the will of the Father.38 Perhaps more charitably, Gouhier argues
that Malebranches struggles to clarify his arguments for the vision in God
over the years brought a correlative shift in vocabulary and imagery.
Nevertheless, it is my contention that Malebranches basic position
remained the same39: only God enlightens minds by revealing and applying His substance to human intellects. As Malebranche succinctly states
in On Physical Premotion (1715): I recognize no other nature that the
efficacious wills of God and I am persuaded that God alone acts immediately in our soul.40
Readers must attend carefully to Malebranches full explanations.
Consider an example Robinet discusses from Dialogues between a Christian
and a Chinese Philosopher. Malebranche first talks of the idea of a hand acting
on and causing amputees pain, then notes that only God acts on the mind
in this way. The entire passage states:
Certainly then the hand that touches them, and affects them with a sensation of pain, is not the one that was cut off. Thus it can only be the idea
of the hand, in consequence of the disturbances in the brain, similar to
those we have when someone hurts our hand. Indeed, the matter of
which our body is composed cannot act on our soul; only He who is superior
to it and who has created it can do so, by the idea of the body, that is to say, by
His very essence insofar as it represents extension.41
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Nicolas Malebranche
However, Robinet cites only fragments from this passage, glossing it as

follows (Malebranches words are in italics): the hand that touches them, and
affects them with a sensation of pain is not the one that was cut off, they [the
amputees] sense by the idea of the hand that acts on the mind on the
occasion of diverse physiological and physical disturbances.42 Taken out
of context this sounds like a new vocabulary with a new philosophical
meaningtaken in context, the new vocabulary is in service of the same
metaphysical point. God reveals His ideas during human perception,
by applying them to our mindsthe divine substance is efficacious. As
Malebranche expounds in his last published work, it is he [God] alone who
by the efficacy [efficace] of His ideas, causes in us all our perceptions,
whether intellectual, whether sensible, agreeable or disagreeable.43 Even
divine ideas do not act on their own accord.
Indeed, ideas are not the kinds of entity that could initiate causal
sequencesthey do not possess a will, they do not individually possess an
intellect, although in their totality they are identified with the divine
Reason. Ideas are not substances in their own right. God is a causal agent
because He is a substance; He possesses intelligence and will, and His
intelligence guides what He wills. When Malebranche argues in Dialogues on
Metaphysics and Religion against granting causal power to matter, he points
out that even if, per impossibile, inert extension could act, it would also need
an intellect to decide how to use that power. In other words, the will cannot
operate blindly:
Suppose that this chair could move itself: which way would it go, according to what speed, when will it decide to move? Thus give it also intelligence, and a will capable of determining itself. In a word, make a man out
of your armchair. Otherwise this power of motion will be useless to it.44
We might take poetic license here and say: that in order for the idea of
intelligible extension to modify a human being, for example, it would have
to have not only intelligence, but also an omnipotent willin a word, we
would have to make God out of an idea.
Instead, because God is all-powerful, His will is necessarily efficacious. This
necessary link between willing something and its coming to pass defines the
causal connection for Malebranche: only God is a true cause, because only
between His will and its effects do we see a necessary connection:
A true cause is a cause between which and its effect the mind sees a necessary connection, this is how I understand it; now it is only between the will
75
of the infinitely perfect being and its effects that the mind perceives a
necessary connection . . . it is a contradiction that He should will and that
what He will should not happen. Thus his power is His will.45
As such, our concept of causality is inextricably linked to the notion of
volition: [b]ut whatever effort of mind I make, I cannot find an idea of force,
efficacy, of power, save in the will of the infinitely perfect Being.46
Unfortunately, as with all things infinite and divine, the precise details of
how God operates escapes our finite intellect. In his final work, On Physical
Premotion, Malebranche argues that although we believe in Gods omnipotence by faith, and are persuaded in it by reason, its mechanism of
operation outstrips our finite minds: God desires a world and the world
comes into being in that very moment. Only the Saints face to face with
the divine essence will fully understand this relation of the efficacious
all powerfulness of the Creators wills.47 So how could ideasneither
substances capable of willing, nor Gods volitionsbe causes themselves?
Clarifying the issue, then, depends on separating discussion of God qua
Word or divine Reason from discussion of God qua will or divine power. All
ideas and thus all knowledge are contained in the divine Word: but unless
God reveals them to us or wills to affect us with His ideas, on the occasion
of our attentive desires for knowledge, we remain ignorant. So the evidence
suggests that Schmaltz is on target in arguing that Malebranches later
philosophy develops the doctrine of ideas as vehicles for divine causation,
but misleading when he concludes from this that the idea produces a certain sort of perceptual effect.48 Similarly, careful attention to Malebranches
views on causation would suggest that Steven Nadler is even nearer the mark
and is glossing the language of causally efficacious ideas to be a way of
fleshing out the characterization of Gods action upon human minds (in
response to attacks by Regis): the ideas which are located in the efficacious
substance of the Divinity affect and enlighten us through Gods power.49
Nadlers own intriguing thesis turns Malebranche into a direct realist, for
whom material bodies are directly perceivedwhatever beliefs or epistemic
elements accompany and are essential to perception are a function of the
idea(s) present therein.50 In other words, as human perception is shot
through with cognition, divine ideas qua logical concepts provide the conceptualization needed to turn a mere animal seeing into a human seeing
that. While I believe Nadlers thesis is textually underdetermined,51 the
important point for interpreting the status of ideas is that Nadlers view
offers yet another way of interpreting Malebranchean ideas that does not
require breaking from either his occasionalism or his substancemode
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Nicolas Malebranche
ontology.52 Ideas read as logical constructs or concepts are not themselves

causally efficacious; God Himself who acts by employing them is. As Jolley
himself argues in his earlier work The Light of the Soul (1990), where he
holds that Malebranchean ideas are conceptsabstract, logical items to
which the mind is related in thinking53if ideas are third realm entities,
it is hard to see how they can have causal properties of any sort.54
In sum, ideasinterpreted either as abstract logical items or as partially
revealed aspects of the divine substancedo not themselves possess causal
properties. Matter, qua bare extension, is not only causally impotent, but
too metaphysically different from mind to act upon it; nor do finite minds
possess the ability to modify themselves. Yet as the union of the soul with
God is essential to the human mind,55 and God alone teaches us all truth
through the manifestation of His substance . . . and without the intervention of any creature, the divine ideas are neither metaphysically distant,
nor is Godwhose will alone is efficaciousunable to act upon our minds
to reveal Himself to us.56
Aside from Malebranches loose usage, part of the interpretive
confusion here stems from investing descriptive categories with metaphysical import. Consider Gueroults assessment that the attribution of
efficaciousness to the idea properly speaking [i.e., to the idea qua idea]
is radically excluded. Intelligible extension, precisely understood, comes
from the Word [divine Reason], not from the will and the power of God.
It is purely passive.57 The suggestion to focus carefully on the idea qua
idea helps us to understand different aspects of the same agentGod
when we talk about God as Reason (which contains Ideas) or God as
cause. Likewise, we can elucidate different aspects of the human agent
when we talk about the minds faculty of intellect versus that of the will.
Yet, just as it would be a mistake to reify the understanding or will into
separate, autonomous agents rather than powers of one mind, it is an
error to reify the divine ideas into separate causal agents rather than
aspects of the divine substance.
Unfortunately, Gueroult appears to fall into this trap of reifying the idea
of intelligible extension when he grants it a property separate from the
divine substance itselffor ideas are not parts of God that could possess
independent qualities such as passivity. And even if such a move were legitimate, making a part of God passive would be ruled out as a matter of
course: there is nothing impotent in God. The divine substance encloses
in its simplicity, in a matter that goes beyond us, all the perfections of creatures, but without limitation and without impotence. Such is the property
of being infinite, incomprehensible to all finite minds.58
77
I propose that while Malebranche sometimes gives an incomplete

formulation of his doctrine, he expects the attentive reader to grasp his
full meaning. It is instructive to compare the confusion over ideas versus
God as causal agent with Malebranches reaction to another critique of his
imprecise usage. In The Search after Truth Malebranche appears to state that
the soul itself attaches color to figures, thereby particularizing them.59 Yet
when Arnauld attributes to Malebranche the view that the soul attaches
color to external objects at will, Malebranche responds with scorn: could
honest people be content with him, when they reflect that he attributes to
an author, whom he calls his friend, the most ridiculous and stupid thought
that could enter a mans mind.60 It is ridiculous to attribute to our soul the
power of attaching color to the idea of extension, despite Malebranches
intermittent loose terminology along these lines, because occasionalism
rules out such causal agency on the part of the soul. We are passive in
sensory perception.
As Malebranche explains in his Response to the Book On True and False Ideas
(1709 version), it doesnt depend on our wills, but on the laws of the union
of the soul and the body, to see colors or to be struck by whatever sensation
might be.61 The reciprocal modalities of mind and body are merely
occasional causes for Gods true and efficacious causal action.62 God set up
the general laws governing the union between soul and bodyand God, by
modifying the soul with color, renders particular a portion of the intelligible idea of extension He contains and reveals to us on the occasion of other
bodies impacting our own (an impact that God causes as well).63 So even
when Malebranche is imprecise and apparently attributes causal powers
to souls or to ideas, he is counting on the attentive reader to fill in the
necessary occasionalist framework.
Jolley, however, appears to believe that making ideas a third kind
of entity, outside the realm of substance and modification, places them
outside this metaphysical stricture that God is the only causal agent
as well:
Now it is true that Malebranche sometimes says that ideas themselves are
efficacious and at other times that God alone acts by means of ideas. But
one cannot simply assume that these two claims are inconsistent; indeed,
it seems clear that they are not. In the first place, Malebranches thesis
that God alone acts on our minds by means of ideas need not be taken as
implying that ideas themselves are not casually active; surely his point is
rather that no substance other than Godneither angels nor bodies, for
examplecan act on human minds.64
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Nicolas Malebranche
Contra Jolley, Malebranches point is that nothing besides God can act on
human minds. This just is his occasionalism. So ideas cannot, strictly
speaking, be efficacious. So Jolley cannot use causally efficacious ideas to
explain the relation between the divine and human reason. Ideas cannot
be a bridge between human beings and God because ideas are the substance
of God, the perfections that are his essence. [A]ll that is in God is God
Himself.65 Jolley could still argue that saying that an idea acts is equivalent
to saying that God acts. The Malebranchean response, however, would be
that speaking with metaphysical rigor, only God Himself can act: (1) an
aspect of God, which does not possess a will or an intellect, cannot act;
(2) further, the human perception of limitations in or aspects of God
does not establish any real, ontological divisions in God to which we might
assign independent causal powers in the first place.
Finally, a strong theory of efficacious ideas reinforces Jolleys own claim
that later in his career, Malebranche abandoned his rationalist belief in the
cognitive faculties. Efficacious ideas must act on and modify us because we
are too cognitively empty to relate to the ideas that are revealed to us or to
occasion our own enlightenment. Jolleys argument for Malebranches
abandoning the cognitive faculties is discussed later; for now, the important
point to recognize is that the doctrine of efficacious ideas held by Robinet
and Schmaltz66 supports the more extreme view that the only way for the
mind to contact or apprehend ideas in God is if those ideas themselves act
on the mind.
Robinet, while never explicitly eschewing our cognitive faculties, prepares the way for this move by declaring that the efficacious ideas acting on
our soul replace Malebranches original theory of the vision in God, where
the unitive life is a contemplative life, consultation of attention rewarded
by the manifestation of the idea.67 In the next section I offer an alternative reading of the ontological status of the divine ideas that leaves room for
a different account of the Malebranchean human mind and its relation to
God. I then use this account to challenge both a strong interpretation of
the efficaciousness of ideas qua ideas and any claim that later in his career,
Malebranche abandoned the faculties of intellect and will.
III. What Efficacious Ideas Really Are

If we look closely at Malebranches texts, we can move toward a resolution
of the problem of the ontological status of ideas. Malebranche does not
think that ideas are independent substances or modifications of God: he
79
thinks that ideas are the substance of God, seen from different perspectives
or as it is representative of created beings. As Malebranche says in the
Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion:
Speaking truly, you see the divine substance, because only it can be
visible, or can enlighten the mind. But you do not see it in itself, or
according to what it is. You only see it in its relation to material creatures,
insofar as those created beings can participate in it or insofar as it
represents them.68
The notion of participation needs explanation. According to Malebranche,
God contains all realities and all perfections. He contains the ideas of all
created and possible beings. He thus knows the essences of everything
He might create because He contains their ideas or archetypes in his
wisdom. And He knows the existence of everything He does make because
He knows His own volitions. Now because the idea of intelligible extension,
for example, is the archetype of created matter, it contains in a perfect way
the reality that created matter imperfectly instantiates. In other words,
even as an ideal Euclidean triangle contains exactly 180 degrees and the
imperfect copy I draw probably does not, the perfect triangle represents
the imperfect triangle because it is its archetype, because it contains
perfectly the properties my imperfect triangle imitates. Ideas represent
creatures by being apprehensions of ways Gods being can be limited; God
fully possesses the perfection of extension that bodies participate in and
thereby possess in a limited way.
Thus God acts on us in the case of pure intellection, for example, by
revealing to us the infinite idea of intelligible extension. He acts on us in
the case of sense perception by limiting a portion of intelligible extension
and rendering it sensible via the sensory modifications He produces in our
soul.69 We do not see the entire essence of God; we only see aspects of Gods
substance, insofar as it represents the beings we see.70 As Malebranche
explains this in the Dialogues between a Christian and a Chinese Philosopher
(17078):
Thus, God, the infinitely perfect Being, including eminently in Himself
all that there is of reality or perfection in all Beings, can represent them
to us in touching us with His essence, not taken absolutely, but taken insofar as it
is relative to those beings, because His infinite essence includes all there is of
true reality in all finite beings. Thus God alone acts immediately in our soul;
He alone is our life, our light, and our wisdom.71
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Nicolas Malebranche
Given Malebranches doctrine of occasionalism, only God has causal power,

only He can act on us. Given Malebranches doctrine of the vision in God,
the eternal, immutable ideas that make sensory and intellectual perception
possible can only exist in God. Given that God, the Being without restriction, exceeds our finite reasons comprehension, we cannot perceive God
in his absolute essence. Taking these three philosophical claims together,
it follows that when God, the only efficacious substance, acts on us in
sensory or intellectual perception, He reveals to us only a certain aspect of
His essencethe aspect that represents a creature or being because it
participates in or imitates that perfection.
For Malebranche, our very being is necessarily connected with God, who
re-creates and conserves it at every moment. Indeed, in describing the
vision in God in the Search Malebranche says that God is in such close union
with our minds that we might call Him the minds place, even as we call
space the place of bodies.72 And because God has within Himself the ideas
of all beings, or else He would not have been able to create them, then
it is certain that the mind can see that in God which represents created
beings, because this [cela] is very spiritual, intelligible, and present to the
mind.73 So if God wills to reveal one aspect of Himself to us, we indirectly
see the created beings for which this perfection serves as an archetype by
seeing this idea directly. In 1700, Malebranche defended this view in his
Response to Rgis, saying:
With regards to my [doctrine of] ideas, I believe that only they represent
themselves directly to me, that I only directly and immediately see what
they enclose; because to see nothing is not to see; but if God has created
some being which corresponds to my idea as to its archetype, I can say
that my idea represents this being, and that in seeing it [the idea] directly
I see it indirectly.74
We are able to see created objects because they are related to or participate
in Gods perfections. Of course, created beings are so related to God
whether we see anything or not: a full account of the causal relations
between God and human minds involved in the apprehension of ideas must
explain what occasions this perception (see later).
Admittedly, Malebranches account of the participation of creatures in
God that allows ideas to be representative qua different perfections in God
is still hard to understand. As Malebranche refers to St. Thomas Aquinas
as his source for this doctrine, it may help to consider what St. Thomas
himself said on this issue. Malebranche notes with approval St. Thomas
81
argument that God perfectly knows His essence and thereby also knows all
the ways in which created beings can participate in His essence.75 Then
Malebranche refers his readers to Aquinas Summa Theologica I, 15,2, which
runs as follows:
Inasmuch as God knows His own essence perfectly, He knows it according
to every mode in which it can be known. Now it can be known not only as
it is in itself, but as it can be participated in by creatures according to
some kind of likeness. But every creature has its own proper species,
according to which it participates in some way in the likeness of the divine
essence. Therefore, as God knows His essence as so imitable by such a
creature, He knows it as the particular model and idea of that creature:
and in a like manner as regards other creatures.76
Creatures are what they are because they imitate or participate in some
divine perfection. Matter is matter because it was created from the
archetype of intelligible extension. If we knew the essence of the soul we
could see precisely what the idea is in which it participates. But of course,
the ideas of mind and matter are only aspects or perfections of Godthey
do not and could not encompass His infinite essence.77 And we see
creatures when God acts on us and reveals these different aspects of His
essence to us.
Awareness of Malebranches eagerness to give argumentative support for his
bedrock philosophical claimall things depend on Godshould prevent us
from accepting theories that have him weakening his occasionalism to solve
the problem of how representation works. Malebranche himself states:
this principle that only God enlightens us, and that He only enlightens us
by the manifestation of a reason or an immutable and necessary wisdom
seems to me so in conformity with religion; and more, so absolutely
necessary to give to whatever truth might be a certain and unshakable
foundation, that I believe myself indispensably obliged to explain and
support it as much as I can.78
Readers of Malebranche are legitimately concerned over the lacuna in
Malebranches system on the issue of representations mechanism. But this
concern does not render less anachronistic attempts of some critics to fill
in the gap with a strong doctrine of efficacious ideas. Unfortunately for
his readers, Malebranche leaves the divine ideas representative function
sui generis.79
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Nicolas Malebranche
IV. The Minds Attention: Why Malebranche Does

Not Need Efficacious Ideas
The proper conception of the ontological status of ideas in God leaves space
for human agency in a way that the stronger doctrine of efficacious ideas
with its implicit attack on the minds cognitive and volitional capacities
does not. This final section offers an alternative account of the role of the
cognitive faculties in Malebranches metaphysics. For while we are passive in
our (initial) sensory perception,80 in the case of intellectual perception
whether focusing on a triangles properties or on determining whether
something is our true goodthe human mind does something to bring about
its illumination. It exercises its power of attention, our wills natural prayer
or desire for enlightenment. Linking the mind qua will and the mind qua
understanding, attention is a desire for knowledge to which God responds
by bringing ideas closer to the intellect. As Malebranche describes this
phenomenon, the will, by its diverse desires, occasional causes of the presence of ideas, in consequence of the general law of the union of the mind
with Reason, renders the understanding capable of diverse perceptions.81
Contra Jolleys claim that divine ideas must act directly on the mind; [so
that] they thereby cause cognitive states to arise in a substance which is devoid
of all genuine cognitive capacities on its own,82 Malebranche states baldly that
[t]he minds attention and application to our clear and distinct ideas of
objects is the most necessary thing in the world for discovering what they
really are.83 This passage from the Search should not be dismissed as part
of an early work, in contrast with Malebranches later, mature corpus.
Malebranche arguably saw the Search as his masterwork, revising and making
additions large and small through the final, sixth edition of 1712, three years
before his death. Had Malebranche radically revised his view of the human
mind, and desired to strip away its powers of attention and perception, he
had ample opportunity to excise undesirable portions of the work.
Malebranche kept his initial differentiation of the understandings total
passivity and inability to occasion the ideas God reveals to it from the wills
attentive ability to desire further information about a particular object,
thereby occasioning further knowledge be revealed to the intellectwhich
knowledge the intellect has the capacity to apperceive. In On Physical Premotion (1715), Malebranche continued to emphasize the vital role of the wills
attention or,
natural prayer, by which one ordinarily obtains the clear perceptions,
which allows us to discern the true from the probable, the true good from
the apparent good . . . one can excite in oneself diverse modifications;
83
not by ones own power, but in consequence of general laws [attention is

the occasional cause of God revealing ideas to our understanding84]. That
is to say one can obtain from God, who alone can act immediately in our soul,
perceptions and motions of all kinds, in consequence of the relations and
connections, that it often depends on us to have with His works.85
Further, the wills power of attention is what secures us the knowledge
needed to avoid the sin of precipitously loving unworthy goods; for when
we attend to things, we also suspend our consent, and do not automatically
give in to natural attraction. Malebranche argues in On Physical Premotion
that the soul has a true and actual power . . . to suspend its consent.86
In the Search, however, Malebranche does not provide much detail of
what our attention consists in, beyond comparing it to a fixing or focusing
of mental perception akin to a focusing of visual perception.87 In the
Response Malebranche argues that although God, as true cause, makes everything, and only communicates His power to finite agents in making their
desires occasional causes that determine the efficacy of certain general
laws, their desires certainly are in their power, because without this, it is
clear that they wouldnt have any power,that is, they would be mental
mechanisms, as devoid of agency and intelligence as inert matter.
Malebranche also repeats this view in On Physical Premotion (1715):
Now the desires of the holy humanity of Jesus-Christ are in his power: he
is free to form them; because if this were not the case, it is obvious that he
would have no power: for I would not have the power to raise my arm, if
it did not depend on me to want to move it . . . for the eternal Law does
not precisely prescribe the detail of all that we must desire and perform,
as do precise and particular commandments that one is only obliged to
make for those lacking intelligence.88
All aspersions about dim-witted human beings aside, what in principle
distinguishes human beings from material beings is their ability to form
their particular desires89 and their capacity to understand the ideas that
God reveals to them in intellectual and sensory perception.
Malebranche never accepted a view of the mind as cognitively and
volitionally impotent. In Dialogues on Death (1697) Malebranche calls our
attentive desires practical desires, and argues that we feel a sentiment of
effort accompanying them, which teaches us that we are actually using the
power which was given to us.90 The bridge between the divine and human
reason is not via efficacious ideas: it is through our exercise of our wills Godgiven ability to focus our attentionto retreat from the senses into the mind
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Nicolas Malebranche
and form a practical desire for enlightenmentand our understandings

capacity to perceive this knowledge.
Jolley acknowledges that in The Search after Truth Malebranche attributes
to the mind two principle faculties, the understanding and the will. The
understanding is the faculty of the soul that passively receives all its modifications; the will, which Malebranche describes as our souls natural movement toward the general good, does possess some activity.91 However, Jolley
neglects to discuss the will. This oversight undercuts his discussion of
the understanding, as the wills ability to desire further knowledge is the
occasional cause of the minds enlightenment. As such, Malebranche conceived of the soul as able both to occasion and to receive knowledge from
God; explaining the nature of the mind, its capacities or faculties, and
the uses we should make of them to avoid error motivates Malebranches
entire project in the Search.92 Malebranche painstakingly catalogues all the
occasions for error so that the mind can learn to realize its dependence on
the body and struggle to free itself: disregarding the reports of the senses
and desiring to see with the eyes of the mind opens up the path to truth
it is only by the minds attention that all truths are discovered, and all
sciences are learned; indeed, the minds attention is nothing but its return
and conversion to God.93 A full characterization of human cognition must
also discuss the wills role in occasioning the understandings receipt of
cognitive materials.
Jolley, however, ignores the wills role in the quest for truth and focuses
on the Searchs characterization of a faculty of pure understanding capable
of receiving enlightenment. He focuses on the early Malebranchean
account whereby the mind still has an ability to be aware of the abstract
ideas that allow us to grasp mathematical truths and that condition our
experience of the physical world. Jolley insists that this original doctrine of
illumination in the Search only establishes that the objects of human thought
and knowledge, our ideas, are in the divine intellect, but leaves the mind
the cognitive machinery needed to receive this knowledge.
In contrast, Jolley claims that the account of divine illumination in the
Dialogues on Metaphysics, a later work, reduces the human mind to both total
passivity and intellectual vacuity: [c]onsidered in abstraction from divine
illumination, the mind has no cognitive machinery of its own; the only
properties it possesses are obscure and confused sensations (sentiments)
which are without representational content and of no cognitive value.94
The mind purportedly no longer has any faculties outside of divine illumination that allow it to be related to ideas; the minds intrinsic state is simply
one of darkness.95
85
Jolley argues that Malebranche abandoned the doctrine of a faculty of pure

intellect in order to make the mind totally dependent on God for its light; if the
mind even had a natural faculty to acquire the light it could be read as being
partially a source of its own light, thus violating the Augustinian stricture that
God alone is a light unto himself. However, Malebranche speaks of the mind as
naturally dark and confused and needing divine illumination in the Search as
well as in the Dialogues; thus either Jolleys thesis must be extended to include
the Search as well, or we cannot take this stricture as evidence of a change
in Malebranches thought. Throughout both of these works Malebranche
emphatically denies all causal efficaciousness to secondary causes, including
minds. He worries about the error of claiming that the human mind could
either produce its own ideas, through an active faculty of thought, or possess its
ideas as modifications, thus becoming an intelligible world unto itself. But
Malebranche never denies that there is something special about the mind, the
mind qua intellect, which enables it to perceive ideas in God.
Yet this is explicitly what Jolley wants to deny. Along with his speculation
that Malebranche wanted to make the mind completely inert out of a strict
interpretation of Augustines warning that we are not lights unto ourselves,
Jolley offers some further textual support for his claim that Malebranche
abandoned mental faculties after the Search. Jolley uses the Elucidations
(added to the Search in 1678) as the bridge to the purportedly new doctrine
in the Dialogues. He focuses in on the following passage from the tenth Elucidation where Malebranche compares those who give the mind a productive faculty of thought to Scholastic talk of faculties and natures:
I am astonished that these Cartesian gentlemen, who rightly have such
aversion to the general terms nature and faculty, so willingly use them on
this occasion. They dislike it if one says that fire burns by its nature or that
it changes certain bodies into glass by a natural faculty: and some of them
are not afraid to say that the mind of man produces in itself the ideas of
all things by its nature, because it has the faculty of thinking. But, whether
they like it or not, these terms are not more meaningful in their mouths,
than in those of the Peripatetics. It is true that our soul is such by its
nature that it necessarily perceives that which affects it: but God alone
can act in it . . . Just as it is false that matter although capable of figure and
motion, has in itself a force, a faculty, a nature, by which it can move itself
or give itself now a round figure, now a square, thus, though the soul is
naturally and essentially capable of knowledge and volition, it is false that
it has any faculty by which it can produce in itself its ideas or its impulse
toward the good, because it invincibly wants to be happy.96
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Nicolas Malebranche
Jolley does admit that Malebranche is clearly attacking here the claim that
the mind has the power to produce its own thoughts, not the claim that the
mind has a faculty of intellect at all.
Indeed, in this elucidation Malebranche explicitly asserts that while the
mind cannot enlighten itself, or give itself ideas, it is capable of receiving
enlightenment.97 The mind can perceive ideas; it simply cannot produce
them in itself. According to Malebranche, mental faculties are not
Scholastic productive natures or faculties that account for and explain
a beings activity. Scholastic natures play a real causal role in created beings
actions. Malebranche is rejecting the doctrine that created beings have
causal efficacy, not the doctrine that the mind has an essential intellectual
component.
Jolley, however, sees in this passage the suggestion of a stronger claim: all
propositions which ascribe faculties to minds are strictly false . . . [and] if
no propositions ascribing faculties to the mind are true, then a forteriori no
propositions which ascribe a faculty of pure intellect to the mind are true.98
If the claim that Malebranche rejected all faculties, even cognitive faculties
(rather than Scholastic productive ones) were true, then Malebranche
would indeed have banished the pure intellect from the human mind. But
Jolley has not demonstrated that Malebranche wants to do away with the
understanding or the will. And given Malebranches repeated insistence
in Elucidation 10 that the mind is naturally capable of knowledge and
volition, it is hard to see any suggestion of this stronger claim that all
propositions ascribing Malebranchean faculties to minds are strictly false.
The view that Malebranche strips the mind of all cognitive abilities, and
the view that Malebranche needs a doctrine of efficacious ideas to fill this
void, both stem from failing to consider the role of the will and its activity
throughout Malebranches oeuvre. In works such as Treatise on Nature
and Grace (1680), Treatise on Ethics (1684), and Dialogues on Metaphysics,
Malebranche develops his account of our ability to focus our attention into
a full-fledged manifestation of the human wills activity and the key to the
real use of the human intellect. Indeed, in the very work that Jolley claims
makes the further step of abolishing all faculties of mind and rendering
passive all the minds states, Malebranche explicitly states this position:
The human mind is also united to God, to eternal Wisdom, to the
universal Reason that enlightens all intellects. And it is also united to
Him through the general laws of which our attention is the occasional
cause that determines their efficacy. The disturbances excited in my brain
are the occasional or natural causes of my sensations. But the occasional
87
cause of the presence of ideas in my mind is my attention. I think

about what I will. It is up to me to examine the subject we are speaking about, or
any other.99
Malebranche clearly held that the wills attention procured (via Gods
efficacy) intelligible objects for the understandings perception and
illumination. There is no void for efficacious ideas to fill here in explaining the union between the divine and human mindinstead, the doctrine
of ideaagents creates a false picture of Malebranches metaphysics. The
mental mechanism brought about by strong efficacious ideas, made explicit
by Jolley, is implicit in the doctrine itself.
As discussed earlier, Robinet also dismisses the role of the wills attention
as the occasional cause of God revealing ideas; indeed, he argues that once
efficacious ideas take over, so to speak, both attention and the bodys
occasioning functions, Malebranche no longer relies on the general laws of
mind/body and mind/Reason union described in earlier works.100 Yet this
interpretation, like Jolleys, seems untrue to Malebranches texts. For
example, Robinet dismisses the explicit language of God teaching us
by the efficacious application of his ideas to our minds in Malebranches
long addition to the 1695 version of Christian Conversations as prior to
Malebranches new position on ideas.101 Instead, Robinet declares that
Malebranche only revealed his last solution of efficacious ideas in the
1702 additions to this work.102 However, many additions to the 1702 edition
stress precisely the claim that God alone acts on us, on the occasion
of either bodily impacts or attentional willings. Malebranche added the
following blunt sentences, for example, to discussions of how we see
creatures in God: He alone can touch or modify our minds103 and God alone
can act on minds.104
As a Christian philosopher, Malebranche was sensitive to the biblical
assertion that human beings are created in the image of God. We share with
God our immateriality (at least as far as the soul is concerned) and our
faculties of intellect and willing; for as Aristes reasons in the Dialogues, surely
knowing and willing are perfections, and God possesses all perfections.105
Even if the way in which God has these abilities infinitely surpasses ours,
and is incomprehensible to us, we know that in having these abilities we are
in some way made in the image of God.
And Malebranche argues in his fifteenth Christian and Metaphysical
Meditations (1683/final edition 1707)106 that a human being without mental
faculties would not be worthy of the God in whose image he was made:
[m]an is not unto himself either the principle of his love, or that of his
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Nicolas Malebranche
knowledge. But what would be a mind without Intelligence and without love?
Could a wise being create, could He conserve such a creature?107 The human
intellect does not produce or contain its knowledge; but it is capable of
knowing. The human wills desire for enlightenment flows from its invincible desire to be happy; but its attentive desires do occasion ideas being
shown to the understanding.
In the preface to his first work, The Search after Truth, Malebranche states
that intellection and volition are the key to the minds union with God,
which elevates the mind above all things, a union so essential that it is
impossible to conceive that God could create a mind without this relation.108
In his final work, On Physical Premotion, Malebranche notes that God made
the first man in the image and resemblance of God.109 He argues that our
ability to use our faculties of intellect and will are the key to enriching our
union with God by worshipping Him as He deserves:
God is a spirit, and He wants to be loved in sprit and in truth: minds are
only capable of thinking and willing. True adoration, then, the interior and
spiritual cult, only consists in thinking and willing as God thinks and
wills . . . one must desire, one must love, as God desires and loves. One
must follow the divine and immutable Law and place ones end, seek
ones good, where God finds his own.110
The cognitive faculties remain: they depend upon God and constitute our
relation to God, a relation so definitive of mind that God himself (though
free not to create at all), having decided to create a human mind, must
endow it with these capabilities. Barring further textual evidence or
argument, then, neither Jolleys claim that Malebranches late philosophy
abandons all mental faculties, nor Robinet and Schmaltzs espousal of
strong efficacious ideas, can be sustained.
In sum, the bridge between the divine and human reason is not via
efficacious ideas: it is through our exercise of our God-given ability to focus
our mental attentionto retreat from the senses into the mind and form
a practical desire for the understandings enlightenment or further knowledge. A full analysis of the nature of the mind in Malebranche and the true
ontological status of ideas reveals that he does not need the problematic
doctrine of active ideaagents that Jolley, Robinet, and Schmaltz attribute
to him. Careful consideration of the role of attention in Malebranches
metaphysics of mind holds the key to various puzzles in his system; further
examination of the Malebranchean doctrine of attention reveals that our
freedom depends on the interplay of our faculties of intellect and willing,
89
which allows us to gain knowledge of God and thus to love Him with the
free rational love that He deserves (and that makes us solidly happy and
worthy of recompense for our efforts).111
Consideration of the problem of human freedom in Malebranche
continues in the next chapter. For now, it should be evident that in his
allegiance to training our faculties of understanding and will in order to
avoid error and gain enlightenment, Malebranche reveals himself as a
committed Rationalist. The wills desire for closer inspection of and the
minds ability to understand clear and distinct ideas is the foundation of the
Cartesian account of cognition: [o]ne recognizes clarity and distinctness,
and even increases it, by paying attention to ones ideas.112 Any account of
Malebranches philosophy that banishes our faculties of understanding and
will and replaces them with efficacious ideas misses the very nature of the
human and divine minds in Malebranches metaphysics.113
Chapter 5
. . . were we in no way masters of our attention, or were our attention not the
natural cause of our ideas, we would be neither free nor in a position to be worthy.
For we would be unable to suspend our consent, since we would not have the power
to consider reasons capable of leading us to suspend it.
OCM 12:28, DM 227
In the final paragraphs of On Physical Premotion (henceforth PPM),

published mere months before Malebranches death in 1715, he warns
that people who do not actually read his works do not have the right to
criticize him. His complaint, though directed at his seventeenth-century
opponents, unfortunately holds true for early modern scholars as well: too
many neglect to actually read his works before passing judgment, attacking
a phantom ad hoc occasionalism and then dismissing Malebranche out of
hand. Indeed, On Physical Premotion (henceforth PPM) may be Malebranches
least read work and has not been translated from the French. This oversight is unfortunate, as PPM has a succinct and informative overview of
Malebranches considered position on human freedom. As such, I will not
offer a chronological development of his views on the human wills power,1
but beginat the end, supplementing with earlier material as needed to
flesh out his account.
This final chapter answers the question of how Malebranche explains and
justifies the human wills purported ability to govern its activity. The problem here should be obvious: given Malebranches doctrine that only God is
a true cause, it appears that all genuine human action is impossible. Divine
omnipotence and free human moral and intellectual agency seem incompatible. Worse still, Malebranches stress on Gods causal omnipotence
exacerbates the problem that Descartes faced of reconciling intellectual
error with divine benevolence, for Malebranche must not only answer why
and how an all-good God permits sin and error but also make human
91
beingsnot Godresponsible for these flaws in a system where God

appears to be the only candidate for action and thus for responsibility.
Commentators from Malebranches time to the present have declared his
attempts to solve this problem a failure: if God has all the causal power,
then humans are determined, whether Malebranche wants to admit it or
not. These critics have assumed that, in Malebranches metaphysical system,
all events fall under laws of occasional causation, and those human free
choices must do so as well. According to Malebranche, however, human
free choices do not fall within the ambit of occasionalism, because only
instances of transeunt (event-event) causation fall under laws of occasional
causation. When agents make free choiceswhen they consent, withhold
consent, and focus their intellectual attentionthey act as agent causes
bringing about a merely immanent change, not as mere bearers of eventstates that go beyond themselves to bring about an event in the natural
world as transeunt causes.
This chapter builds a case that Malebranche holds a twofold doctrine
of causation: (1) transeunt causation, whereby God connects events in
the natural world to one another and to His ideas; and (2) immanent
causation whereby intelligent, free human beings made in the divine
image agent-cause their withholding of consent and focus their attention.2
If more contemporary philosophers would read his work they would
discover him as a friend to contemporary agent-causation theorists (especially of the theistic variety). Instead of looking to Thomas Reid as their
philosophical ancestor3, indeterminists could profit from closely reading
Malebranches works.
I. Malebranche on the Will, Freedom, and Grace

Malebranches final work was a response to the 1713 publication of Laurent
Boursiers De Laction de Dieu sur les cratures: trait dans lesquels on prouve la
prmotion physique par le raisonnement. Et o lon examine plusieurs questions qui
ont rapport la nature des esprits et la grce.4 Boursier accepts some of
Malebranches tenetsthe passivity of matter, for instance, and its total
determination in its motion by Godand argues that Malebranche should
extend such determination to the human will as well. This objection is
hardly new: it surfaced in one form in the first Elucidation to The Search after
Truth as the observation that conservation as continuous creation seems to
suggest that God creates our consent like He constantly creates everything
else, including each movement of matter.5
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Nicolas Malebranche
According to Malebranche, the human will is the general movement

toward the universal good (which happens to be God, but may not be
apprehended as such) that He impresses on us.6 Our natural inclination
toward the general good is voluntary in that we are not forced to wish to be
happy and to possess the good. Here Malebranche echoes St. Thomas, who
argues that the desire for the good or happiness is a necessity of our nature
and so does not violate or constrain us, even though we are not free to
desire any other ultimate end.7 Malebranche insists here, as from the start
of his oeuvre, that although we cannot help but invincibly want to be happy
(as this general movement toward the good just is our will), we can and
must suspend our consent to decide among different motives or paths to
that happiness.8
So we can never will not to be happy in generalthere is no such thing
as total liberty of indifference to will whatever we wish (even to be damned,
e.g.). But we can decide to stay with and thus consent to our natural attraction to this or that particular good:
It is by physical motives, by which God touches and moves the soul, that
He governs as He wishes. He is without a doubt much more than us the
master of our wills. But wanting also to communicate to us some power,
or some domain for our actions, He left us the power to suspend our
consent and to examine before choosing among the diverse motives He
produces in us.9
Pleasure moves us; and Malebranche specifies that we have to sense and be
moved before we can consent; God causes this pre-deliberative attraction or
motion toward particular items that appear good to us.10 Yet pleasure and
the motion it produces do not amount to my consent: my will can suspend
its consent to this motion. I can examine any physical motive before
deciding whether to give or refuse my consent to the particular good that
seems to cause it. Malebranche asserts that as long as pleasure does not fill
our vast desire to be happyand only God could satisfy that desirethe
soul is not determined to consent to any particular good.11
Here we may profitably supplement Malebranches discussion with his
description of the will and intellect in The Search. According to Malebranche,
the understanding is passive, it does not judge but merely perceives: it is
the will alone that really judges by assenting to, and voluntarily remaining
with, what the understanding represents to it.12 So the understanding
perceives things and their relations and the will judges based upon this
information. The will judges by assenting to, and voluntarily remaining
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with, what the understanding represents to it.13 Further, Malebranche

argues that whereas truth does not affect us, goodness does. Thus, when
judging a truth, the will merely assents to a relation between ideas, such as
a relation of equality between 2 + 2 and 4. Yet when judging about goodness, the will both assents to a relation of agreement [convenance] between
a thing and us, as well as having an impulse toward it. So, for example, the
will not only assents to the relation between humans and water that water
will slake our thirst, but also desires to drink the water. Our consent to
truth versus our consent to goodness is further differentiated because
Malebranche claims that when the evidence for a truth is complete, the will
is not indifferent and must consent; [b]ut it is not the same with goods, of
which we know none without some reason to doubt that we ought to love it
(God obviously excepted).14
The key is that when evidence is obscure, as when we can question whether
or not something is our true good, we are free not to consent to fully loving
it. For we should never love any temporal good instead of or more than
God. So when the will rashly assents to a confused perception of the good,
it does so freely and sinfully.15 Our freedom of the will, exemplified in our
ability to withhold consent to any good or non-evident truth, saved us from
error (judging badly) and sin (loving wrongly). Since the will has a natural
inclination toward truth and goodness, and what has the appearance of
truth or goodness may fail to be so, if the will were not free in both cases to
suspend its consent and order the understanding to examine things, but
assented necessarily to appearances, it would err almost all the time. Therefore, Malebranche argues, God gave us freedom so that we would have the
ability to avoid error, by assenting only to truth and never merely to
probabilities.16
Accordingly, Malebranche offers two rules for avoiding error: (1) in the
sciences, we must only consent to propositions which seem so evidently
true that we cannot refuse it of them without feeling an inward pain and the
secret reproaches of reason; and (2) in morals [w]e should never absolutely love some good if we can without remorse refuse to love it, which we
should read as commanding that we should never consent to fully love a
good that reason does not declare to be the true good.17 Proper use of our
freedomconsenting only to the truth and absolutely loving only Godis
the chief duty of all spiritual beings, as much for angels as for men, and
the key to their perfection.18 The key to human freedom is the ability to
suspend our consent until we are sure we are consenting only to the right
things, and thereby to ally oneself with the divine will. But how can
Malebranche square this apparent power with his occasionalism?
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Malebranche first attempted to respond to such charges of inconsistency

in his first Elucidation. His somewhat vague answer at the time was that
while God causes in us our perceptions, sensations, impulses . . . all that is
real or material, he does not create us consenting to any particular good.19
The implication was that while God created in us all our modes, including
our desires and perceptions, and made us materially predetermined
toward the good in general, because we necessarily will to be happy,20 He
gave us the limited power to give or withhold our consent to any particular
good. Thus we can follow or abandon the motion toward any particular
good that God impresses on us, although matter cannot in a parallel way
respond to the motion God impresses upon it. Boursier is challenging
Malebranche again on the legitimacy of breaking this analogy.
To engage this argument fully, we need to unpack the terminology
involved. More specifically, we need to understand what Malebranche
and Boursier mean by physical causation. According to the Dictionary of
Catholic Theology, physical premotion is:
A motion passively received in the second cause, to bring it to act, and if the
second cause is living and free, to act vitally and freely . . . [for] only the
creative cause [God] is capable of producing the being of a given effect
and all its modalities, necessary or free.21
The emphasis here and in Boursiers definition differentiates them from
Malebranches, as they stress that the human soul is determined to even its
purportedly free acts. For according to the doctrine of physical premotion,
the human will is free even though predetermined by God, even though
under the efficacious divine motion, the [human] will cannot either fail to
do the act efficaciously willed by God, or propose (pose de fait) to do the
contrary act.22 Boursier agrees with this assessment that the human will is
free, though under the effect of the always efficacious divine will it cannot
do other than consent to this motion. Malebranche challenges that Boursier
cannot, on such a definition, attach any meaning to the claim that human
agents act freely. Malebranches fierce commitment to the principle of
alternative possibilities undermines those who would interpret him as
extending divine control even to the wills consent and attention.
Premotion, according to its adherents, is supposed to indicate priority of
reason or cause, not of time: for the active motion from God and the passive
motion of the creature so moved by God happen simultaneously, since this
concerns an eternal decree, superior to time, of which the divine motion
assures the fulfillment.23 This premotion is called physical, not in contrast
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with the spiritual, but with the moral. In his discussion of physical premotion,
Garrigou-Lagrange traces this distinction to Saint Thomas, who distinguished
motion quoad specificationem actus (for an end or insofar as a specification of
an act) and motion quoad exercitium actus (which comes from an agent or
intelligence, insofar as an exercise of an act) and suggests that we should
identify the former with a moral cause of motion and the latter with a physical cause of motion. Thus he argues:
For Saint Thomas, the divine motion which carries us to our free and
good acts, is a motion quoad exercitium or physical, that, by itself and infallibly, inclines us, without violating us, to this rather than that free act, all
this because divine causality extends itself even to the free mode of our
actions, which is still a being. Which is to say that, for him, divine motion
is predetermining, though not necessary.24
In contrast, Malebranche will strongly maintain the claim that any motion
of our willno matter what its sourcecannot be free if its consent is infallibly determined. Even God cannot make our consent predetermined and
infallible, but still free. For Malebranche, then, any attempt to render the
soul as passive as matter, as predetermined by divine motion as a material
body, is a violation of the soul.
To reiterate, Malebranche thought that reason (philosophy) and faith
(religious tradition) supported his doctrine of the freedom of the will:
I think that what I have said will appear clear to an attentive spirit and
that those who are without prejudice will find it conforms to the doctrine
of Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas and to the decisions of the Church
against the Pelegeans and the Calvinists . . . But his [Boursiers] true
design, which appears from reading his book, is to demonstrate that interior grace is not only efficacious in itself, in relation to the will that it
actually moves [toward the true good] . . . he pretends further that graces
movement by its very nature and by itself, is efficacious with respect to the
consent of the will, and that it operates in the soul the action, the will, the
consent itself. He pretends that grace leaves the soul the power not to consent to
it; but once applied to the will, it is contradictory that at the same time the will
wont consent to it.25
Malebranche argues throughout this work that Boursiers claim of God
physically predetermining the soul is at bottom the same as Antoine
Arnaulds Jansenist insistence on efficacious grace. We cannot feel or resist
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the first and we can feel but cannot resist the second: so both destroy human
freedom, with horrifying consequences.26 These consequences would
include making God responsible for sin and evil, and making it impossible
for humans to deserve punishment or reward.27
To fill in the background on Malebranchean grace, we must turn to The
Treatise on Nature and Grace, the 1680 work that so enraged Antoine Arnauld.
TNG focuses on extending the same kind of general laws that govern the
realm of nature (as discussed in The Search) to the realm of Gods grace.
Malebranche reminds his readers that it is not worthy of an infinite being
to act by a multiplicity of particular wills; rather, God accomplishes the infinite works of nature by a small number of general wills, that is, the laws of
nature. And it is the same wisdom and will, the same immutable God, who
establishes both the realms of nature and of grace and as the ultimate and
general cause governs both orders with the simplest general laws. Indeed in
his (in)famous28 rain analogy, Malebranche makes a parallel between the
action of general laws in the material and spiritual order:
It is necessary, according to the laws of grace, that God has ordained, on
behalf of his elect and for the building of his Church, that this heavenly rain
sometimes fall on hardened hearts, as well as on prepared grounds . . .
Grace not being given at all by a particular will, but in consequence of the
immutability of the general order of grace, it suffices that that order produce a work proportioned to the simplicity of his laws, in order that it be
worthy of the wisdom of its author. For finally the order of grace would be
less perfect, less admirable, less lovable, if it were more complex.29
Earthly rain falls on the sea as well as on the prepared ground; heavenly
rain sometimes falls on hardened hearths as well as on prepared one. Yet in
neither case do we have cause to complain, as the laws governing both the
realms of nature and grace are simple, fruitful, and thus worthy of a wise,
immutable God.
Yet although passive matter can certainly do nothing to change or effect
the ways in which it is acted upon and moved by the general laws of nature.
Malebranche hints that human beings can do something to change the
direction or way in which grace affects them. For although we cannot merit
grace30 or make it rain upon us, human beings can augment its efficacy
when it does arrive. They must avoid occasions of sin and thus remove
some impediments to the efficacy of grace, and prepare the ground of their
heart, such that it becomes fruitful when God pours His rain according
to the general laws which He has prescribed to Himself.31 Malebranche
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attributes to humans, then, the ability to avoid sin by following the counsels
of Christ. He directs that in those moments in which passions leave us
some liberty, we must seize the chance to clear away, as much as is in ones
power whatever blocks the action of grace within us.32
Such theological discussions of grace, which might seem of little interest
to many contemporary philosophers, are essential to a full understanding
of Malebranches theory of the human will. For within his theory ought
does imply canand if he challenges his readers to align their wills with
Gods, it is because he believes that they do have the power to follow his
counsel. Malebranche believes that human beings have an obligation to
love God freely and rationally. For while only God can, as true cause, produce grace in our souls (and only Christ can merit this gift for us), grace
can either be determined by feeling or enlightenment33 and occasioned
either by Christs desires or our own.
The grace of Jesus Christ, what Malebranche calls the grace of feeling
in the TNG is not what is most interesting vis--vis his doctrine of the human
will. For Malebranche places this kind of grace truly beyond us, in the
supernatural realm: these prevening delectations, which produce love of
the divine order and horror at sensible objects, are a gratuitous gift. As
punishment for the Fall, human beings are plagued by concupiscencean
attraction to sensible objects that precedes rational thought about them;
the grace of Christ counterbalances the weight of sensory attraction and
thereby puts our wills in a better place to resist fleshly pleasures and to
determine itself by itself.34 Our soul is created wishing to be happy, with
an impulse toward the good. So all particular goods, which create pleasure,
naturally move us toward their apparent causein the case of sensible pleasures, toward sensible objects. Sensory pleasures fill up our souls capacity
and keep it from having the capacity or capability of focusing its attention
on anything else. Until these sensory pleasures dissipate our soul is out of
balance. The grace of Christ, however, can also put our soul back into
balance, by opposing sensory pleasure with either pleasure in holy or
rational goods or horror and pain in sensory goods. However, the occasional cause of this grace is the different desires of the heart of Jesus and
not anything in us. This grace puts us in a better place to act freely, but since
we do not occasion it this grace is not subject to our wills. As such, this grace
is not directly relevant to our moral responsibility to use our freedom to
align our wills with Gods.35
In the PPM, Malebranche refers to the grace of Christ, the grace of
feeling, as actual grace and takes it to be the variety of grace at issue with
his opponents. Thus, he claims that the Council of Trent, Augustine, and
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Aquinas himself are on his side in declaring that even the will moved by
grace can give or suspend its consent to this divine motion. Malebranche
distinguishes from efficacious grace and Boursiers physical premotion,
actual grace, which according to Saint Augustine consists in the knowledge
and taste of the good, in the delectation of justice.36 The actual grace (of
Christ) gives pleasure in the good (and horror at the bad) and so affects
the soul. Malebranche freely admits that this knowledge and sentiment of
the good moves our will, more so as our knowledge is clearer and our sentiment livelier. But he claims that one cannot know or sense the physical
premotion the Thomists admit.37 Physical premotion, on this reading,
collapses into Gods action itselfwhich we cannot sense or directly know
and so cannot consent to, and thus cannot freely consent to. Malebranche
tries to use this point to discredit Boursiers claim that the soul is still free
on his account of physical premotion, since we cannot consent to a motion
or motive that we dont sense or feel and that doesnt stir up our natural
desire for happiness.38
Malebranche calls instead the (Christ occasioned) prevening delectation
or spiritual pleasure the true and real physical premotion, the true interior
grace, prevening and efficacious, that Saint Augustine held against the
Pelagiens, who wanted only the actual grace of the light.39 This grace gives
us pleasure in the true good; it is always efficacious, because it always moves
the will. Indeed, Malebranche reiterates the claims that he had held from
the beginning, that all pleasure precisely as such moves us toward its real or
apparent cause. Butand this is the key for Malebrancheneither this nor
any other pleasure determines the free movement or consent of the will. Pleasure in the true good and horror at vice are the true and real Malebranchean
physical premotion: which [because we have an interior sentiment of
them] are in consequence very different from the premotion of the
Thomists, to which one can neither consent nor resist, because one doesnt
sense it at all.40
The kind of grace most relevant to Malebranches account of human
freedom, in contrast, is what he calls the grace of enlightenment in TNG.
The grace of enlightenment is of the natural order and its occasional cause
comes from human beings themselves: enlightenment is diffused in our
minds according to our different wills, and our different efforts . . . but the
delectation of grace is diffused in our hearts only through the different
desires of the soul of Jesus Christ.41 Our different wills and efforts comprise
our power of attention, which Malebranche characterizes in The Search as a
fixed mental gaze or focusing.42 According to the Vision in God, recall, God
He who includes all things in the simplicity of His being is present to our
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mind, so all beings are always already present to our mind, albeit in a
general and confused fashion.43 We can focus in on particular beings
or goodsand this attentive desire occasions God to reveal the needed
ideas to us. We can act on our vague sense that the particular present good
is not enough to satisfy our desire for happiness and attend to what Elmar
J. Kremer describes as an object under the general description something
greater than X.44
We also have access to relations of magnitude (truth) and perfection
(Order) contained in the divine reason. By examining these we can see the
same truths that God sees and the Order according to which He wills and
regulate our judgments and willings accordingly. As Malebranche explains
this in The Treatise on Ethics (1684):
Truth and Order are real, immutable and necessary relations of magnitude and perfection, and these relations are contained in the substance
of the divine word [i.e., divine reason]. Consequently anyone who sees
these relations sees what God sees. Anyone who governs his love by these
relations, follows a law which God invincibly loves.45
When we see the truth that 2 + 2 = 4 (a relation of magnitude) or that a
woman is more perfect than a horse (a relation of perfection), we are
seeing the very same relations as God and our neighbor.
Thus our attention is the occasional cause of all of our knowledge: [f]or
in the end, the different desires of the soul are natural or occasional causes
of the discoveries we make on any subject that may be.46 And the knowledge gained through this enlightenment can, in turn, call us to align our
will with Gods. A human being is free to search for the truth and to choose
to follow or abandon Order: He can in a word, earn merit or demerit.47
Thus although Malebranche insists that only God can truly act on creatures
and make them happy or unhappy by giving them pleasure or pain, he also
claims that human beings are capable of knowing and loving, in addition to
feeling. And whereas Malebranche acknowledges that pleasure and pain do
not depend on us or our efforts, he purports that knowing and loving
depend considerably on man himself.48 It is up to us to suspend our consent, focus our attention, and thereby gain knowledge, and thereby follow
or diverge from the divinely impressed general notion of love within us.
Our chief duty, according to Malebranche, is to choose to submit ourselves
to the love of Orderwhich is a virtue precisely because it is not a necessity
(like the law of gravity or the love of pleasure in general) but something we
must freely choose.49
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Indeed, Malebranche argues that although faith (given through the grace
of Christ) may be sufficient for salvation of the weak, carnal man, the rational man must also work to gain light (the grace of the creator). For:
Evidence or understanding is preferable to faith. For faith will pass away,
but understanding will endure eternally. Faith is truly a great good, but
this is because it leads us to an understanding of certain necessary and
eternal truths, without which we can acquire neither solid virtue nor eternal felicity. However faith without understanding . . . faith, I say, without
any light (if that is possible) cannot make us solidly virtuous. It is the light
which perfects the mind and governs the heart.50
A love of the divine Order based on light, gained through our efforts, is
preferable to one based on feeling, given to us through faith.
The attention of the mind is the natural prayer by which we obtain
enlightenment by God in proportion to our efforts.51 God made attention
the occasional cause of our knowledge because otherwise we would not be
able to be masters of our wills.52 For as Malebranche sees it, our knowledge,
exited by way of our desires which alone are truly within our power has the role
within us of being the principle of all governed movements of our love.53
We exercise our freedom through our suspending consent and our effort of
attention, which allows us to see the ideas/objects we will subsequently
judge worthy or not of our consent and love.
The senses, passions, and imagination, however, can disturb or interrupt
and thus block our attention. Attention requires effort or something from us.
The cultivated skill of withdrawing the mind from the senses and imagination to be attentive to the voice or reason is strength of mind. Since this ability
to exercise our attention is difficult, Malebranche warns his readers that they
must start practicing it early in life, as itlike all habitsis acquired only
through its use.54 Yet even though our attention is only an occasional cause,
and does not cause anything outside itself, neither the ideas it sees nor the
sensation it feels, it does appear that the soul brings about its internal state
of attention. If attention is a modification of mind, and the mind brings it
about, it has a power that seems to escape the occasionalist tenet that God is
the one true cause. I contend that Malebranche makes an exception for
powers that are self-contained, such as the minds power over its attentive
desiresto go beyond itself, and relate to the world or to God, the mind still
depends on God acting in response to its occasional cues.
For Malebranche the mind only is the mind because God enlightens it,
only exists because God made and preserves it for Himself, and only moves
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through the motion that God impresses on ityet it abuses this motion.55
We can only abuse this motion of our will because we have the power to
decide whether or not we continue on toward the true good or halt with a
particular good.
Malebranche distinguishes kinds of occasional causes. Whereas bodies
are totally passive and unfree, minds possess some activity and thus are free.
In an illustration added to TNG in 1681, Malebranche responds to claims
that God gives the soul of Jesus qua man all its movements and thoughts
that is, that Jesus as man is a mental mechanism. Malebranche denies the
charge, arguing that Christs thoughts have his desires as their occasional
causes, for he thinks of what he wants.56 He contrasts a bodys collision,
an occasional cause without intelligence and without freedom with Jesus, an
intelligent occasional cause, enlightened by eternal wisdom.57 Malebranche
links intelligence with freedom.
Recall that according to Malebranche, God made us only for Himself (the
only possible end worthy of an infinitely perfect being) and so He can only
make us invincibly love Himself. Our liberty turns on this non-invincibility
vis--vis loving particular goods.58 Regarding particular good, the will can
be determined by either (1) clear and evident knowledge or (2) confused
feeling. Since the soul is always attracted toward what appears to be good,
the feeling of a particular good always initially pulls the will toward it.
Yet since the soul is intelligent, it can realize that any given particular
good is lacking and does not exhaust its desire for the good. The soul can
halt and compare this good with other goods it has experiences and with
many other ideas of goods contained in the divine reason and thereby resist
the attraction of any particular sensible good. This ability to without our
consent, says Malebranche, makes up for any limits on our knowledge.59 In
fact, the very act of suspending our consent increases the likelihood that we
will not judge badly:
[f]or we cannot suspend our judgment without arousing our attention.
But the attention of the mind makes all vain appearances disappear, and
so, too, for the probabilities which seduce the careless, the weak minds,
the servile souls given over to pleasure. These people do not fight for the
conservation and augmentation of their freedom; not being able to support the effort of examining apparent goods, they imprudently consent
to everything which flatters their concupiscence.60
The free and reasonable human being uses her power to suspend consent
and focus attention to access the ideas of other goods; she can find other
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goods when she desires them because it is her desires that cue God to reveal
them to her mind (so to speak).61 In contrast, the lazy soul simply stops as
soon as it finds any apparent good, moves along when it sees others or
has other desires, and is doomed to wander through a random cycle of
thoughts, desires, and pleasures. Such a soul does not use its freedom;
instead, it lets itself be led aimlessly by the motion which transports it, and
by the fortuitous meeting with objects which determine it.62
Liberty is not a static ability, equal in all people. It varies with its exercise
and with its objects. Our bodies have different structures, our minds have
varying motions, and people have varying relations to the world around
them. So we do not all have equal power to suspend our judgments, we
dont all have equal power to resist pleasure and to focus our attention.63
Liberty is an ability that is increased and perfected by the use made of it.64
Although Malebranche insists that we only merit salvation through Christs
sacrifice, we do not simply have to sit and wait for Christ to grant them
the additional grace of feeling to resist sensory pleasures; they can work
to perfect their liberty even through their natural powers [leurs forces
naturelles].65
Since all unfree, inert physical mechanism are incapable of augmenting
their union with God, the moral of the story here is that we should only use
such items to preserve our life and never love them or seek union with
them. Sensory goods sustain our bodies, but they cannot sustain our hearts.66
Love of union should be reserved for the true good, the cause of our happiness. We may also show a love of esteem of kindness for another human
being, the kind of being capable of enjoying the same kind of union with
God as us, and wish her all the goods she needs, though she cannot cause
our happiness or give us any goods.67 But we sin if we rest with and love with
a love of union a particular good or person instead of continuing on toward
the greater good, God. And we have this power to sin due to our ability to
perform free acts, for
Not all pleasure produces free love; for free love does not always conform
to natural law. It does not depend on pleasure alone. Rather, it depends
on Reason, on freedom, on the souls strength [la force] to resist a movement
pushing against it. It is the consent of the will which makes the essential
difference with this type of love. These two different acts of love form our
habits, each after its own way. Natural love leaves the soul with a disposition of natural love; love by choice leaves of habit of love by choice. For
when we have often consented to love a certain good, we have a tendency
to, or a felicity in, consenting to it once again.68
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When we love God with a love of union, and when we resist giving such love
to bodily goods, we perform a free action. The souls strength resists the
push of pleasure and we conform to the law of reason instead of the law of
nature of the earthly realm.
Malebranche claims that the grace of enlightenment, obtained by our
attentive desires, is enough for the true man to love the true good, whereas
the weak man will have to be given the grace of feeling to attract him by
pleasure to love of the true good.69 It is not enough that we love the true
good: to merit we must love the true good freely and from reason. When
one gives in to the temptation of false pleasure, we sin and abuse our freedom. When we love the true good through pleasure it is not demeritorious,
but neither is it meritorious. One only merits by surpassing the initial
impulse of pleasure and basing ones love on reason alone.70 Loving God
merely by feeling, by instinct, means that one does not love him on earth
as He wants and ought to be loved. But one merits when one loves God by
choice, by reason, by the knowledge one has that He is lovable.71 Human
freedom boils down to the will determining itself according to knowledge
and not according to feeling; this knowledge comes about in the first place
because we suspend judgment and freely fix our attention.
While it is possible that, in the afterlife, pleasure could be our reward, it
is not only currently dangerous as a guide to knowledge of the good, but
also it cannot currently bring us meritonly the free and rational love of
God can do that. Merit and demerit are nothing except the good or bad
use of freedom, save in that in which we are factors.72 We are praiseworthy or
blame worthy only insofar as our free agency factors in our choices. We use
our freedom badly when one makes pleasure ones reason.73 One can
always suspend consent in order to choose whether one will follow ones
reason or ones senses74; to merit and to be true to ones rational nature,
one must choose the former. Yet the question remains: how precisely do
finite human beings have the power to make such a choice freely within an
occasional universe where God possesses all true causal power? The time
has come to turn again to Malebranches last work in the hope of a more
complete answer.
II. The Physical, the Moral, and Malebranches

Agent Causation
In PPMs account of what we do when we consent, Malebranche develops
the distinction he gestured at in the first Elucidation by saying God does
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everything material or real in us. Now he contrasts the physical with

the moral. According to Malebranche, the physicalsuch as the sensations we feel and our natural attraction to objectsis what God does in us
without us.75 In moralsuch as the consent we give or withhold to such
sensationsis what God does in us with us.76 For as he comments elsewhere, while it does not depend on us to sense, our consent does depend
on us,77 we can give or withhold it. But he cautions we must never mix up
these physical, predeliberative [indilibers] motions, with our consents or
our free determinations of our will: for whereas God alone, acting in us
without us,78 produces the first, it is we who consent or resist pull of attraction and suspend our consent. Malebranche is distinguishing between what
we might call a passive power and an active one. Indeed he says that the soul
has two different activities or powersand that the first is properly speaking only the action of God in her.79 This is the constant forward motion of
desire toward the general good, the souls invincible desire to be happy. He
explicitly compares this motion of the soul to the motion of bodies, whose
moving force is only the creative efficaciousness of the will of God that recreates them in different places.80 The souls attraction to both the general
good and the movement of attraction toward particular goods are likewise
certainly the effect of the [divine] creative will.81
But the second power of the soul differs greatly from this passive ability.
The soul possesses a
true power to resist or to consent to the motion that naturally follows
the appearance of a good. And she has this power, because she is not
invincibly moved toward this good or that object that appears good to
her, because God has created her ceaselessly willing to be happy and
solidly happy.82
Our end is set: only God can satisfy our capacity to be solidly happy and all
particular goods fall short. Thus we are able to break from the weaker pull
of physical pleasure because of the always present awareness (however dim)
that this pleasure is not our ultimate end. God created the will active, free,
mistress of her consents.83
Yet even if passively resting with the natural attraction to a particular good
clearly requires no true action on our part,84 God also holds us responsible
for not withholding our consent from inappropriate goods, since He
responds to my disordered loves qua occasional causes of feelings of regret
or remorse.85 Further, breaking away from that attraction does appear to be
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a change in our souls internal make-up and thus appears to be an instance

of our modifying ourselves, of bringing about an event, and thus violates
Malebranches doctrine of Occasionalism. And how should we understand
his assertion that even though God ceaselessly moves our will and that we
can desire nothing save by the force and power of Godbut even though
God may be the cause of all our motives, He is not so of the acts by which
we consent to or resist these motives?86 Thus the problem of substance/
modification ontology is rearing its ugly head. Malebranche accepts the
Cartesian classification of beings into substances and their modes as
exhaustive. For in the final analysis, it is absolutely necessary that everything in the world be either a being or a mode of a beingwhich no attentive mind can deny.87 Yet if God creates beings and all ways of being, this
insistence on human freedom appears inconsistent with Malebranches
metaphysics.
Malebranches answer comes in elucidating human beings special status
as intelligent, free occasional causes made in the divine image and endowed
with a will capable of immanent causation of some of its desires. He does
not take the step of explicitly positing some other ontological category than
substance and mode. Rather, he returns to his claim that pace Descartes, we
do not have a clear idea of the soul. So we cannot give the requisite analysis
that would explain the ultimate status of our souls power:
One must have a clear ideas of the soul that is to say, see the archetype on
which God formed it, to define or clearly explain what is its activity, its
power of producing these immanent acts, by which she [the soul] acquiesces or doesnt acquiesce to the physical motives that solicit her . . . if one
insists, and wants to know precisely what is this power, this activity of the
soul, these immanent acts of the will: I answer that it is what each person
senses at every moment; that the act of consent is what one senses in oneself, when one consents.88
Although we are aware of what passes in our soul, we do not know its
archetype, so we cannot hope to demonstrate its properties.89 We cannot
clearly explain, like we can for the properties of a triangle, what the souls
acts consist in or how they arise in the soul. Neither can we explain how
God can foreknow our free acts even though he does not necessitate
them. Malebranche avows that in answer to such questions I recognize the
weakness and the limits of my mind.90 Inner sensation never deceives us
about that something that exists in us91; but it does not give us knowledge of
106
Nicolas Malebranche
what we are aware of: thus inner sensation can tell us that we have freedom,
but cannot tell us how we do.92
However, because we are intelligent, we see that although we are too
limited to grasp the answer, there must in principle be an answer. Only
God, who knows our archetype because He created us, knows the solution
to this thorny problem. Yet His benevolence shows in His communicating
his perfection to intelligent causes insofar as they freely share in His goodness by allying their wills and intellects with His, even if they dont know
what in them permits this. Admittedly, this answer feels like a cop-out on
Malebranches part. When we remember that Malebranches motivation is
to base all of His explanations on God and His Order, however, we may get
a better grasp of why he gives this answer (even if the answer still does not
satisfy us).
Malebranche asserts that because God wants us to use our liberty to
consent or not to grace, He would never predetermine that consent in
Boursiers fashion that there is a contradiction, that given premotion, it
[the will] doesnt consent.93 As noted, since Malebranche believes that sin
just is consenting to what we should not, if God physically predetermines
our consent, then He becomes responsible for sin. And if God is responsible for sin, His punishment of Adam and other purported sinners becomes
unjust. Indeed, Malebranche accuses Boursier and his ilk of destroying
not only the freedom necessary for merit, but also the reality of the divine
attributes themselves. For Malebranche, any explanation that does not
honor Gods attributes is a non-starter.
Malebranche uses an analogy to explain how physical premotion
conflicts with the proper account of God. Suppose, he says, that a workman carves a dozen beautiful statues in his image, all joined at the head
and the neck with a hinge. He gives them in this way the power to nod
their heads when someone pulls a cord attached to the hinge. He pulls
the cord and they honor him with their salute. He is content with them
until one day he realizes that he owes them nothing, he can make others,
and he has total power over them. Now he goes to his statues and stands
before them and doesnt pull the cord so that they reverence him. Seeing
that they refuse to honor him, he destroys all but the few whose cords
he did pull (and so who saluted him). Malebranche closes the example by
sarcastically demanding one asks of the author [Boursier] if the conduct
of this clever workman manifests the character of a profound and incomparable wisdom.94
Malebranche clearly intends to compare the vain and stupid workman
with the kind of all-powerful, unjust, and unwise God of the Jansenists and
107
Boursier-style Thomists. Malebranche rejects the doctrines of physical

premotion and efficacious grace for the same reason that he rejects
Descartes doctrine of the free creation of the eternal truths: he believes
that God limits Himself according to the wisdom or order with which He is
consubstantial. What is good or true for God is also good or true for human
beings; the eternal and moral truths do not exist simply because God willed
them. Gods willings cannot be arbitrary, cannot be their own justification.
God is infinitely wise according to Malebranche because there is a reason for
all that He does, and that reason is the immutable order of His attributes.
Power executes his designs and does not form them.95 God cannot desire
to contradict Himself because He invincibly loves that which He is
essentially . . . God depends, so to speak, on the eternal law and He
remains independent: He depends only on Himself because this law is
consubstantial with Him.96
God could not and would not want a universe of human statues to honor
Him, because this would go against his essential wisdom, goodness, and
justice. Malebranche comments that if God were only all powerful, Hobbes
and Locke would have discovered the true foundation of morality
authority and power given without reason, the right to do anything one
wants, with nothing to fear.97 But the relations of perfection in God are not
simply truths, according to Malebranche, they are lawslaws that bind both
the human and the divine to love things in proportion as they are lovable,
that is, participate in the divine perfections. So even God cannot make the
idea of a human being have less perfection than a pig.98 The moral of the
story is that God always acts according to what He is.99 Recall that Order
is the essential limit that He places on Himself: therefore in willing,
God submits Himself to the immutable and necessary relations between His
perfections or attributes.100
So because God is just, good, and wise, and because He must always act in
a way that bears the character of His attributes, He made human beings and
angels freefree to sin, free to merit or demerit, free to love Him with a
love of reason and not merely blind feeling. It is human agents enlightenment that brings them to God. Seeing the true good allows us to love it
properly. Thus Malebranche reverses the Augustinian dictum to believe
that you may understand to claim that true understanding leads to true
and meritorious belief:
The cult of intelligences, capable of thinking and of willing, only consists
in judgments conformed to those that God brings from Himself [porte de
lui-mme] and in the movements regulated according to the immutable
108
Nicolas Malebranche
order of justice. An intelligence that thinks and wills as God thinks and
wills is respected before Him. He adores God in spirit and in truth. He is
of the true adorers who seek the father (Ch. 4 of St. John).101
For Malebranches rationalist theology, although we merit salvation only
through Christ, we come closer to God through our proper use of our
reason. As he declared in The Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion, if we
freely follow Order then God will be entirely in us, and we in Him in a way
much more perfect than that by which we must be in Him and He is us that
we might subsist.102 For Malebranche argues that as only a free love of God
based on reason honors Him more than a love from instinct, and God must
act in ways that honor His attributes, so if He decided to create humans, He
had to make them free.
Readers must look closely to see the creativity of Malebranches development of attention as a form of immanent cause, akin to what contemporary theorists call agent causation. Malebranche granted human beings a
special status as intelligent, free agents endowed with a will capable of
immanent causation of its desires to withhold consent and for enlightenment. More specifically, even though our attention is only an occasional
cause, and does not cause either the ideas we see or the sensations we feel,
the souls desires do cause its internal state of attention. This power,
however, does not violate the occasionalist tenet that God is the one true
efficient transeunt cause.
The contrast between a transeunt and immanent cause distinction developed in medieval philosophy and came to Malebranche via Francisco
Suarez, whose Metaphysical Disputations (1597) Malebranche attacked in the
fifteenth Elucidation to the Search. Malebranche obviously discarded the
talk of species and form that went with Suarezs Aristotelian metaphysics.
However, the basic idea of a transeunt cause as one whose action is in some
way distinct in reality from the material cause that receives the effect and
an immanent one as an action received in the operating thing itself . . .
received in the same faculty by which it is elicited103 clearly impacted
Malebranche.104 Malebranche makes grants to angelic and human minds
powers that are self-contained, such as the minds power over some of
its desires without violating occasionalisms demand that truethat is,
efficient/transeuntcausal power rests with God alone. To go beyond
itself, and relate to the world or to God, the mind still depends on God
acting in response to its occasional cues. We are not the true efficient causes
of the knowledge that results from our volitions; God reveals His ideas to us;
109
we do not cause this revelation. But the mind is decidedly not inert, as is the
material world.
Interestingly, from Malebranches original introduction of occasionalism
in VI.2.3 of The Search after Truth, he focuses on matters inability to move
itself or other bodies; but Malebranche says little about the minds ability to
determine its particular willings in the first place. Instead, Malebranche
focuses on showing that our willings are inefficacious precisely because they
neither move bodies nor cause ideas. Yet he does not give much consideration of our willing or focusing our attention as in itself problematic. Were
he alive today, Malebranche would heartily endorse Alfred J. Freddosos
claim that according to occasionalism, God is the sole efficient cause of
every state of affairs that is brought about in pure nature, i.e. in that
segment of the universe not subject to causal influence of creatures who
are acting freely.105
For Malebranche the key to real causation comes from going outside of
ones self to effect a real or physical change, such as causing bodily
motion, attaching color to the idea of extension, or otherwise contacting
divine ideas, and not from the souls immanent (self-contained) operations.
Consider the following passage from the Search:
But were one to assume what is in one sense true, that minds have in
themselves the power to know truth and to love good, still, if their thoughts
and wills produced nothing externally, one could always say that they are capable
of nothing. Now it appears to me quite certain that the will of minds is
incapable of moving the smallest body in the world; for it is clear that
there is no necessary connection between our will to move our arms, for
example, and the movement of our arms. It is true that they are moved
when we will it, and that thus we are the natural cause of the movement
of our arms.106
Malebranche quickly adds the caveat that natural or occasional causes
are not true causes, they act only through the efficacy of God, the one
true cause.
Yet Malebranche concerns himself with showing that our wills are not
true causes of our bodies movements or of our receiving knowledge via
Gods ideaswith the fact that because our wills produce nothing externally they may be said to produce nothing as true causes. Indeed, the only
change Malebranche made to this passage throughout the six editions of
110
Nicolas Malebranche
the Search was to say that minds have en (in) themselves this power to
know truth and love the good, rather than having that power deux
mesmes (from) themselves, as stated in the first four editions.107 In other
words, whereas Malebranche took pains to emphasize in later editions
that this power came from God (as all our faculties or abilities do) and
not from ourselves, he did not give up his belief that we possess this power
of willing.
Likewise, in the fifteenth elucidation, added in 1678, Malebranche
stresses that not only do our minds have such a power, but also our inner
awareness of this fact is stronger than any doubts to the contrary:
There is quite a difference between our minds and the bodies that
surround us. Our mind wills, it acts, it determines itself; I have no doubts about
this whatsoever. We are convinced of it by the inner sensation we have of
ourselves. If we had no freedom, there would be no punishment or future
reward, for without freedom there are no good or bad actions. As a result,
religion would be an illusion and a phantom. But what we clearly do not see,
what seems incomprehensible, and what we deny when we deny the efficacy of
secondary causes is that bodies have the power to act. The mind itself does not
act as much as is imagined. I know that I will and that I will freely. I have
no reason to doubt it that is stronger than the inner sensation I have of
myself. Nor do I deny it. But I deny that my will is the true cause of my
arms movement, of my minds ideas, and of other things accompanying
my volitions, for I see no relations whatever between such different
things.108
Religious and philosophical convictions are pushing Malebranche in this
passage. Clearly, on spiritual grounds, he believes that without freedom,
punishment or reward would be arbitrary and morality impossible. However,
he also believes on metaphysical grounds that whereas analysis of the
clear and distinct idea of body qua extension shows that body is incapable of action, our inner sensation of ourselves convinces us that or wills
are free.
Malebranche should be seen as an ancestor to libertarians such as
Chisholm, who contrast transeunt or event-event causation with immanent or agent causation.109 In Malebranches version of this distinction,
immanent causation is unique because it is self-contained and simultaneous. It is a basic act110 that does not admit of further analysis. Malebranche
himself never attempted a formal philosophical argument for how this
111
ability fits in with his occasionalism. We could, however, reconstruct the

following explanation:
1. we cannot initiate any external action or bring about contact with ideas;
2. premise (1) does not forbid that our particular desires to know (attend)
originate with us, that is, we will freely and God does not compel or
necessarily cause our particular willingsthey are up to us. If we will
to do F, the will to do F is ours, whereas only God can efficiently cause F
to take place;
3. x is a true cause if there is a necessary link between x and its effect;
4. our willing is not a true cause:
(a) our willing is not a true cause of F; for there is no necessary link
between our will and F, since F only occurs if God brings F about [but
(3) requires a necessary link];
(b) nor is our will a true cause of our willing; for then there will be an
infinite regress; so it, but if it is impossible, it is not necessary;
5. Therefore our will is free without itself being a cause.
Bringing this argument together with Malebranches point about our lack
of clear knowledge of the soul, we might reason as follows. Until we see
the idea of our soul in God, we cannot either know all of the modifications of which our soul is capable or fully understand the status of the
modifications with which we are familiar. Yet insofar as we are spiritual
beings and are made in the image of God, we can gain some knowledge
of the soul. In receiving simultaneous modalities without being composed
of parts we imitate the divine simplicity and universality. Through its particular willings the soul has an immanentnot efficaciouspower that
bears a faint resemblance to the divine wills all-powerful causal efficacy.
By using the knowledge gained through our attention to fully love only
the one true good and thus willing to follow Gods order, we follow the
same law that God does. Through the vision in God, we see the same ideas
that He does.
Finally, our willings qua practical desires for knowledge and our consent
allow us to follow Gods law and they are what in us most resemble Him.
Our will is active without being an efficient cause. Our particular attentive
willings to attend are free because they originate with us, although they do
not truly cause anything external to us. We were made to know and love
God111; attention, by occasioning ideas and thus giving us knowledge, and
consent, by allowing us to follow Gods law, permit us to exist more fully in
112
Nicolas Malebranche
God by allying our selves with the divine will. The way in which our willings
arise in our substance will only be understood when we have access to the
archetype on which our soul was formed; we cannot hope for a full explanation in this lifetime. Lacking the idea of our soul, clear and distinct
knowledge of its essence is beyond our ken. Malebranche believes that in
seeking a complete answer to the problem of reconciling human and divine
agency we have come up against the limits of our knowledge (at least this
side of the grave). But Malebranche does possess the framework for such an
explanation. Contemporary theistic agent causation theorists could build
profitably upon his construction.112
Notes
Chapter 1
1
2
3
4
5
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
All bibliographical information is from Y.M. Andr, La Vie de R.P. Malebranche

(Paris: Ingold, 1886; reprint edition, Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970).
Acts 17:28, Malebranches favorite Pauline dictum.
Nicolas Malebranche, Oeuvres Compltes de Malebranche, ed. Andr Robinet (Paris:
J. Vrin, 195870), Volume I, page 45; henceforth OC followed by volume
number and page(s); The Search After Truth, trans. Thomas M. Lennon and
Paul J. Olscamp (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980): 4. Henceforth
SAT. Where translations of Malebranches various works exist I have benefited
from consulting them, though sometimes I have preferred my own. Where
works remain available only in French, all translations are my own unless
otherwise noted.
OC I 10, SAT xxxiiixxxiv.
The French, of course, have always given him his due; check the bibliography for
the many French studies of Malebranche.
Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy, trans. A.H.C. Downes
(New York: Charles Scribners Sons, 1940): 1415.
A.A. Luce, Berkeley and Malebranche: A Study in the Origins of Berkeleys Thought
(New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1988).
Charles J. McCracken, Malebranche and British Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1983): 1415.
Ibid., 19.
Andr Robinet, Malebranche et Leibniz: Relations Personelles (Paris: J. Vrin, 1955a).
OC II 310, SAT 446.
OC II 310, SAT 446.
OC II 310311, SAT 446447.
OC II 311, SAT 447.
OC II 312, SAT 448.
OC II 312313, SAT 448449. Malebranche makes a qualification to this
comparison of the passivity of minds and matter, noting that the former can
determine the impression God gives them toward Himself toward objects other
than Himself, I admit; but I do not know if that can be called power. If the ability
to sin is a power, it will be a power that the Almighty does not have, Saint
Augustine says somewhere. Malebranche later drops the claim that the human
will can determine the direction of the moving force God impresses upon it;
see Chapter 5.
114
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
Notes
OC II 313, SAT 448.

See Chapters 4 and 5.
OC II 314, SAT 450.
OC II 313, SAT 448.
OC II 312317, SAT 448451.
OC II 316, SAT 450.
OC II 318, SAT 451.
OC II 319, SAT 452.
For discussion of the ArnauldMalebranche debate and its philosophical import,
see Chapter 3.
OC V 12. Nicolas Malebranche, Treatise on Nature and Grace, trans. Patrick
Riley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992): 112. Henceforth TNG.
OC V 1315.
They are, however, discussed in Chapters 2 and 5.
OC V 28, TNG 116.
OC V 28, TNG 116.
Gods action and general volitions are discussed extensively in Chapter 2,
especially in sections II and III.
OC V 30, TNG 117. Malebranches laws of motion, like Descartes, were problematic; unlike Descartes, however, he revised his many times over the yearsespecially
in response to criticisms by Leibniz. For the latter, see Robinet 1955a.
OC V 31, TNG 118.
OC V 32, TNG 118.
OC XII 167; Nicholas Malebranche, Dialogues on Metaphysics and on Religion,
ed. Nicholas Jolly, trans. David Scott (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1997): 122. Henceforth DM.
OC XII 150151, DM 107.
OC XII 154155, DM 110111.
OC XXII 155, DM 111.
OC XII 155157, DM 112114.
OC XII 160, DM 115116.
OC XII 160161, DM 116.
OC XII 165, DM 120. See Chapter 2.
OC XII 165, DM 120. See Chapter 2.
Thomas M. Lennon, Philosophical Commentary in SAT, pp. 810811.
On the question of Descartes occasionalism, see Daniel Garber, How God
causes motion: Descartes, divine substance, and occasionalism, Journal of
Philosophy 84 (1987): 567580; and Gary Hatfield, Force (God) in Descartes
Physics, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Vol. 10 (1979): 113140.
On Arnauld, see Steven Nadler, Occasionalism and the Question of Arnaulds
Cartesianism, in Descartes and His Contemporaries, eds. Roger Ariew and
Marjorie Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1005): 129144. For discussion of another Cartesian whose occasionalism more explicitly leaves room
for a causally active soul, see Steven Nadler, The Occasionalism of Louis de la
Forge, in Causation in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Steven Nadler (University
Park: Penn State Press, 1993): 5773. For an overview of the issue of partial and
full occasionalism in various seventeenth-century philosophers, see Steven
Notes
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
115
Nadler, Coredmoy and Occasionalism, Journal of the History of Philosophy,

Vol. 43, No. 1 (2005): 3754.
OC I 447, SAT 235. For more on Gods relation to order, see Chapter 2.
OC I 416, SAT 218.
OC I 447, SAT 232.
OC I 413414, SAT 217.
See Chapter 4.
OC I 414, SAT 217.
OC I 418, SAT 220.
OC I 418419, SAT 220221.
A Scholastic Aristotelian scholar would find many things to protest against in this
brief account, but the accuracy of Malebranches portrayal of his opponent does
not concern me here. I simply want to show how Malebranche gets to the vision
in God and the positions he thinks he is up against and how he deals with them.
For a detailed analysis of the complex scholastic explanation of visual perception, see Alison Simmons, Explaining Sense Perception: A Scholastic Challenge,
Philosophical Studies, Vol. 73 (1994): 257275.
Steven Nadler makes a convincing case that Malebranches target here is Arnauld
and Nicoles 1662 Port Royal Logic in his article Malebranche and the Vision in
God: a Note on The Search After Truth III, 2, iii, Journal of the History of Ideas,
Vol. LII, No. 2 (1991): 309314.
OC I 424, SAT 223.
OC I 425, SAT 223.
OC I 431, SAT 227.
OC I 431, SAT 227.
OC I 432, SAT 227.
OC I 434, SAT 228.
Tad Schmaltz has recently argued that Malebranches reasoning for the
Vision in God and his reasoning for occasionalism parallel one another in
structure: for the first, Malebranche focuses on Gods eminently containing
creaturely perfections qualifying Him as the only being capable of representation; for the second, Malebranche emphasizes Gods omnipotent will
qualifying Him as the only being capable of real causation. See Tad Schmaltz,
Malebranche on Ideas and the Vision in God, in The Cambridge Companion to Malebranche, ed. Steven Nadler (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2000): 6168.
OC I 434, SAT 228.
OC I 434, SAT 229.
OC I 434435, SAT 229.
OC I 435, SAT 229.
OC I 436, SAT 229.
OC I 437, SAT 230.
OC I 437, SAT 230.
OC I 438, SAT 230.
OC I 438, SAT 231.
OC I 438, SAT 231.
OC I 441, SAT 232.
116
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
Notes
Consider also OC XII 5758, DM 27: However, I maintain you could form
general ideas only because you find enough reality in the idea of the infinite
to give the idea of generality to your ideas. You can think of an indeterminate
diameter only because you see the infinite in extension and can increase or
decrease extension to infinity. I hold that you could never think of these abstract
forms of genera and species were the idea of infinity, which is inseparable from
your particular circle, but never of the circle. You could perceive a particular
equality of radii, but never a general equality between determinate radii. The
reason is that no finite and determinate idea can ever represent anything infinite and indeterminate. But the mind unreflectively joins the idea of generality
which finds in the infinite to its finite ideas.
OC III 149, SAT 625.
OC XII 143, DM 1415. This claim is controversial and at the heart of the
ArnauldMalebranche debate; see Chapter 3.
OC XII 143, DM 15.
OC I 441, DM 232.
OC XII 5152, DM 2122.
OC I 441, SAT 232. See Chapter 4.
David Scott, On Malebranche (Australia: Wadsworth-Thomason Learning
2002): 6162.
Concepts move our bare grasping of sensory data to a seeing that something
is so. See Robert Audis discussion of perception in Robert Audi, Epistemology:
A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge (New York: Routledge
2003): 1630.
OC I 442, SAT 233.
OC I 10, SAT xxxiv.
OC I 443, SAT 223.
OC I 445, SAT 234.
OC III 154, SAT 627628.
OC I 446, SAT 235.
OC XII 69, DM 36.
OC XII 103108, DM 6670.
OC XII 122, DM 82.
OX XII 289, DM 226; emphasis added.
Chapter 2
1
2
3
4
5
6
OC XII 183184, DM 135. See also OC X 40, OC XV 3, OC XV 10, and

OC XVI 59.
See, e.g., OC III 148, SAT 624, OC XII 185, and DM 137138.
OC VII 248. This issue of containment turns also on the point that God does
not contain His ideas as modifications or as individual substancesrather, Gods
ideas are the divine substance. See Chapter 4.
OC XII 183, DM 135.
OC XII 191, DM 142.
OC XII 191, DM 142.
Notes
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
117
Emphasis in the original; OC XI 19, Nicolas Malebranche, Treatise on Ethics,

transl. Craig Walton (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993) and this
corresponds to volume 5 of the complete works (OC), page 46; henceforth TE.
OC XII 175, DM 128.
One refreshing exception is Andrew Pyles recent work Malebranche (London:
Routledge, 2003), chapter 3.
Rene Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery
(11 vols) (Paris: CNRS/Vrin, 196474), VII 432; henceforth AT; Rene Descartes,
The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ed. and transl. John Cottingham, Robert
Stoothoff, Dugold Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny (3 vols) (Cambridge:
Cambridge UP, 198491), II 291; henceforth CSM when referring to either
volume I or volume II of this work. For an in-depth analysis of Descartes on the
eternal truths, see Dan Kaufman, Gods Immutability and the Necessity of
Descartess Eternal Truths, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 43, No. 1 (2005):
119, which also contains extensive citations of the literature on this issue.
Ginette Dreyfus, La Volont selon Malebranche (Paris: Librairie J. Vrin, 1958): 36.
Ibid., 3637.
OC V 33, TNG 119.
OC III 138, SAT 619. See also OC XVII-1 752753.
OC III 72, SAT 579.
OC XII 200, DM 151. See also OC XII 194195, DM 146.
OC V 38, TNG 121.
OC V 110. See TNG 162.
OC XII 178, DM 131.
Dreyfus 1958 39.
See OC V 15, TNG 112, OC V 40, 122.
OC XII 205, DM 155.
Malebranche adds that God receives a second glory from the worship of the
eternal church, whose head is Christ. Our worship alone would be unworthy of
God, because as finite creatures our praises are not worthy of the infinite. But,
vile and contemptible creatures that we are, through our divine leader we
render and shall eternally render divine honors to God, honors worthy of the
divine majesty, honors which God receives and will always receive with pleasure.
Our adorations and praises are in Jesus Christ sacrifices of pleasing fragrance.
OC XII 206, DM 156.
OC V 28, TNG 116.
OC XII 214, DM 163.
For a comparison of the theodicies of Malebranche and Leibniz (through the
filter of Antoine Arnauld), see Steven Nadler, Tange montes et fumigabunt:
Arnauld on the Theodicies of Malebranche and Leibniz, in The Great Arnauld,
ed. Elmar J. Kremer (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1995): 147163. See
118
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
Notes
also Donald P. Rutherford, Natures, Laws, and Miracles: The Roots of Leibnizs
Critique of Occasionalism, in Causation in Early Modern Philosophy: Cartesianism,
Occasionalism, and Preestablished Harmony, ed. Steven Nadler (University Park:
The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993).
OC V 29, TNG 117.
Pyle has recently argued a similar line of interpretation to my own, describing
Order as the most balanced total expression of all the divine attributes. Pyle
2002 121; see also pp. 114120.
OC V 32, TNG 119.
OC V 3132, TNG 118.
OC XII 215216, DM 164. Admittedly, Malebranche puts this speech in the
mouth of Aristes, the occasionally confused pupil in the Dialogues. But this is one
of the speeches whereafter he has started to get ithe summarizes his
Master Theodores philosophical position. And Theodore soon after this speech
notes approvingly that general principles (such as the one about God acting so
as to honor His attributes) are the most fertile and charming.
OC V 46, TNG 126.
OC V 46, TNG 127.
Given that God is omniscient, his resolute choices must be the right ones and
they never require revision (even in circumstances that from our point of view
seem to merit reconsideration). On resolute choice, see David Gauthier,
Assure and Threaten, Ethics 104 (July 1994): 690721.
OC V 46, TNG 127.
OC V 52, TNG 131.
OC V 5051, TNG 129130.
OC XI 2526, TE 50; emphasis added.
OC V 167, TNG 211.
OC V 167, TNG 212.
OC XI 32, TE 55.
OX XII 292, DM 229.
Later, I will examine the debate and side with Nadler; Andrew Pessin has also
recently sided with Nadler in this debate, though he takes a different approach
than my own, drawing on contemporary terminology and discussion from the
philosophy of mind. See Andrew Pessin, Malebranches Distinction Between
General and Particular Volitions, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 39,
No. 1 (January 2001): 7799.
Arnauld to Leibniz, March 4, 1687, Die Philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried
Wilhelm Leibniz, 7 vols, ed. C.J. Gerhardt (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 196062) as
cited in Steven Nadler, Occasionalism and General Will in Malebranche,
Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 31, No. 1 (January 1993): 33. This quotation is not definitive proof, however, that Arnauld equated Gods action in
occasionalism with his role in pre-established harmony. Nadler admits that in a
letter to Leibniz dated September 28, 1686, Arnauld seems quite clear on
the difference between the two. In this letter, Arnauld notes that, for Leibniz,
when my soul feels pain at the injury of any arm, neither the body nor God acts
directly on the soul to cause the pain. It must be then that you believe that it is
the soul which formed the pain itself, and that this is what you understand, when
Notes
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
119
you say that what happens in the soul on the occasioning of the body is created
from its own depths (LG 65). Arnauld does seem to understand that Leibniz
unlike Malebranchewants created beings to have their own productive natures.
Arnaulds later letter exhibits his understanding of this difference in the systems;
however, he clearly has begun to wonder how Gods setting up an initial preestablished harmony among creatures, even one that unfolds due to their
natures, differs from Gods setting up and then following himself the laws
of nature. In both cases God ultimately decides what will happen, even if
Leibnizs creatures actively carry out this plan and Malebranches creatures
passively receive it.
I Nadler 3337.
Emphasis in the original; ibid., 4142.
Ibid., 43.
See ibid., 44. Pessin is in strong agreement with Nadler here, arguing persuasively that Malebranche directly links generality with nomicity and particularity
with anomicity; see Pessin 7989.
OC V 147148, TNG 195.
Emphasis in the original; OC V 148, TNG 196.
As cited in I Nadler 41.
Desmond Clarke, Malebranche and Occasionalism: A Reply to Steven Nadler,
Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 33, No. 3 (1995): 499504, p. 501.
Ibid., 501.
See ibid., 500.
Ibid., 503, OC V 166, TNG 210211.
Clarke 503.
OC V 166, TNG 211.
My thanks to Lisa Downing for helpful discussion on this point.
OC XII 177, DM 131.
See, e.g., OC III 137, LO 618, OC VII 248, OC XII 182183, DM 135136,
OC XII 185, DM 137138, OC X 40, OC XV 10, and OC XVI 59.
OC XII 183, DM 136.
OC XII 175176, DM 129.
Steven Nadler, Malebranches Occasionalism: A Reply to Clarke, Journal of the
History of Philosophy, Vol. 33, No. 3 (1995): 505508, p. 507.
Introduction to DM xxv.
For similar reasons, I disagree with commentators who claim that Malebranche
changes his position (circa 1688 and onward) to make ideas themselves efficacious. See my discussion in Chapter 4.
OC XII 161, DM 117.
See OC XII 157, DM 112.
OC XII 176, DM 129.
OC XII 177, DM 130.
OC XII 184, DM 137.
OC XII 176, DM 130.
OC XII 184, DM 135.
I owe the example to Lisa Downing.
OC XII 178, DM 131.
120
81
82
83
84
Notes
OC XII 179, DM 132.

OC XII 176, DM 130.
OC XII 180, DM 133.
My thanks to John Heil, Robert Perkins, and Sylvia Walsh for helpful comments
on an ancestor of this chapter.
Chapter 3
1
Indeed, Arnauld conspired successfully to bring about the Holy Office of the
Roman Indexs 1690 condemnation of this work. See OC XVIII 534538 and
IX (19) 550559, for discussion of the events leading up to the condemnation.
For a book-length examination of the philosophical and personal battles between
Arnauld and Malebranche, see Denis Moreau, Deux cartsiens. La Polmique entre
Antoine Arnauld et Nicolas Malebranche (Paris: J. Vrin, 1999). For a shorter analysis
of the pairs mutual philosophical misunderstandings, see Denis Kambouchner,
Des Vraies et des Fausses Tnbres: La Connaissance de Lme daprs La
Controverse avec Malebranche, in Antoine Arnauld: Philosophe de Langage et de la
Connaissance, d. Jean-Claude Pariente (Paris: J. Vrin, 1995): 152190.
Here I am in agreement with Aloyse-Raymond Ndiaye, who comments, Arnauld
lui-mme ne sest engage dans une longue polmique contre Malebranche, que
parce quil taient persuade que les erreurs thologique de loratorien sur
la grce taient dues sa philosophie des ides et de leur vision en Dieu;
Aloyse-Raymond Ndiaye, Le Statue des Vrits ternelle dans la Philosophie
dAntoine Arnauld: Cartsianisme ou Augustinisme? in Antoine Arnauld,
Chroniques de Port Royal 44 (Paris: Bibliothque Mazarine, 2005): 283. Denis
Moreau argues at length for this view of Arnaulds motivation in attacking
Malebranche in The MalebrancheArnauld Debates, in The Cambridge Companion to Malebranche, ed. Steven Nadler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000): 87111.
Arnauld to Quesnel, October 18, 1682, OC (of Malebranche) XVIII 241242, as
cited/translated by Elmer J. Kremer in the introduction to his translation of
Arnaulds On True and False Ideas (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1990): xxi,
note 39.
Cornelius Jansen, bishop of Ypres (Belgium) controversial work Augustinus was
published post-mortem in 1640. In it he defended views on human freedom and
grace that he attributed to Augustine, but which were subsequently condemned
(especially for denying that freedom from necessity in response to grace is
required for human merit) by Pope Urban VIII in 1643, by Pope Innocent X in
1653, by Pope Alexander VII in 1656 and 1665, and by Pope Clement XI in 1705
and 1713. Arnauld wrote two Apologies pour Jansnius in 1641 and 1645. See Jean
Laporte, Le Jansnism, in tudes dhistoire de la philosophie francaise au XVIIe sicle
(Paris: Vrin, 1951): 88105; Kremer 1990 xiiixxiii; and Alexander Sedgwick,
Jansenism in Seventeeth-Century France: Voices from the Wilderness (Charlottesville:
University of Virginia Press, 1977).
For a discussion of Arnaulds particular combination of Jansenism and Cartesianism, see Tad M. Schmaltz, French Cartesianism in Context: The Paris Formulary
Notes
10
11
12
13
14
121
and Regiss Usage, in Receptions of Descartes: Cartesianism & Anti-Cartesianism in

Early Modern Europe, ed. Tad M. Schmaltz (London: Routledge, 2005): 8095.
For more on Arnaulds relationship to Jansen and his views on grace, see Elmar
J. Kremer, Grace and Free Will in Arnauld, in The Great Arnauld and Some of His
Philosophical Correspondents, ed. Elmar J. Kremer (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1994): 219239.
Pelagius (ca. 360431) emphasized human effort and responsibility for their
own salvation, at the expense of divine grace; his disciple Celestius was excommunicated in 411 by the Council at Carthage for preaching the Pelagian
doctrine, but Pelagius himself was acquitted of the charge of denying the
necessity of grace, although Councils of Carthage in 417418 (influenced by
St. Augustine) condemned the Pelagian doctrine that human beings are inherently good and are saved by Christs teachings rather than actual grace. John
A. Mourant, Pelagius and Pelagianism, in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Logic
to Psychologism, Vols 56, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Collier Macmillan
Publishers, 1967): 7879.
Elmar J. Kremer, Arnauld on the Nature of Ideas as a Topic in Logic: The PortRoyal Logic and On True and False Ideas, in Logic & The Workings of the Mind, ed.
Patricia Easton (Atascadero: Ridgeview, 1998): 67.
Indeed, as Steven Nadler has remarked, the theological stakes were high in the
MalebrancheArnauld debate, and much more was involved than simply a
debate about perception and its objects: On the one hand, Arnauld feels that
the view that external objects are not directly perceived is so counter-intuitive,
and so contrary to common sense, that it affords him the best and easiest
means of attacking Malebranche. If he can demolish Malebranches representationalism, he will thereby have destroyed his theory of the vision in God. It is,
in effect, an easily grasped handle by means of which Malebranches whole
edifice, theology and all, can be torn down. Arnaulds real concern is with
Malebranches views on God, grace, and other theological matters. The critique of Malebranches representationalism thus becomes the philosophical
linchpin in Arnaulds attack on his unacceptable theology. This is, I believe,
the real motivation behind Arnaulds concern with perception. Steven Nadler,
Arnauld and the Cartesian Philosophy of Ideas (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1989): 139.
Antoine Arnauld, 1683. On True and False Ideas, translated by Elmer J. Kremer,
Studies in the History of Philosophy: Volume 7 (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen
Press, 1990): 165. Henceforth TFI.
As Nadler points out, In a letter to Regius (May, 1641), Descartes distinguishes
between the activity [actio] and passivity [passio] of one and the same
substanceunderstanding is the passivity of the mind, willing is its activity.
So mind qua understanding passively receives ideas, whereas mind qua will
actively operates upon these ideas. Nadler 1989 46.
See, e.g., Descartes CSM I 204205, AT VIIIA 1720; CSM II 39, AT VII 5657;
CSMK 182, AT III 369.
AT IV 113114, CSMK 232.
TFI 19.
Ibid.
122
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
Notes
Emphasis in the original; Nadler 1989 110. Unfortunately, considerations of

length prevent my engaging the debate over how to understand Arnaulds
theory of perceptionas a form of direct or indirect realism. For more on that
debate, see ibid.; Steven Nadler, Reid, Arnauld and the Objects of Perception,
History of Philosophy Quarterly, Vol. 3, No. 2 (April 1986); Monte Cook, Arnaulds
Alleged Representationalism, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. XII, No. 1
(January 1974); Daisie Radner, Representationalism in Arnaulds Act Theory of
Perception, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 14, No. 1 (January 1976); and
Elmer J. Kremer, Arnaulds Philosophical Notion of an Idea, in ed. Elmar
Kremer, The Great Arnauld and Some of his Philosophical Correspondents (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1994). For now, I am focusing on the fact that
Arnaulds conception of an active intellect limited and shaped how he conceived
of the nature of ideas in general, not the specific theory of visual perception that
that entails.
Emphasis in the original; TFI 20.
AT 7 40, CSM 2 2728.
For a discussion of the admittedly odd concept of greater and lesser degrees of
reality/perfection in the history of philosophy, see A.O. Lovejoy, The Great Chain
of Being (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1936).
TFI 19.
Or, more specifically, superfluous for human perception. David Scott has recently
made the point that even if Arnauld were correct that Malebranchean ideas in
God were unnecessary for human perception, the divine ideas as exemplars for
creation were just as necessary for Arnauld as for Malebranche. See David Scott,
On Malebranche (Australia: Wadsworth, 2002): 7374.
R.W. Church argues that the rejection of passivity is the heart of Arnaulds attack
on Malebranche, [i]n his criticism of the prejudice in favour of local presence,
Arnauld is combating precisely this view of thought as something passive and
therefore able to know only what independent ideas render present to mind.
Ralph Withington Church, A Study in the Philosophy of Malebranche (London:
George Allen and Unwin LTD, 1931): 179. Robert McRae makes a similar point
when he notes that [b]ecause for Arnauld, as opposed to Malebranche and
Locke, an idea is not an object of the mind, but an act of the mind, the notion
of the mind as passively receiving its ideas is meaninglessthough it may
make sense to receive ideas if they are objects. Robert McRae, Idea as a
Philosophical Term in the Seventeenth Century, Journal of the History of
Philosophy, Vol. 26 (1965): 82. More recently, Elmar Kremer has argued that
the ArnauldMalebranche debate boils down to [w]hether our cognitive
acts essentially exhibit their objects to us, or whether they are exhibited to us
by something else, in Malebranches case, by God and His divine ideas;
Kremer 1998 69.
Emphasis in the original; TFI 20.
TFI 1920.
Radner 1976, 98. Sara Garcia-Gomez also comments on Arnaulds failure to be
specific about the manner in which the soul is able to do this [form its own
inherently representative ideas]; see Sara Garcia-Gomez, Arnaulds Theory of
Ideative Knowledge, The Monist, Vol. 71, No. 4 (October 1988): 553.
Notes
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
123
Emphasis in the original; TFI 21. Compare to Descartes CSM II 7475,

AT VII 102103.
Kremer 1994 93.
Ibid., 94.
Cook 1974 61.
VFI 25, quoted in Kremer 1994 95.
Kremer 1994 95.
Emphasis in the original; VFI 33, quoted in ibid., 9596.
Kremer 1994 96.
It has been in vogue recently to reinterpret Descartes as a kind of direct realist.
See, e.g., Robert Arbini, Did Descartes have a Philosophical Theory of Sense
Perception? Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 21 (1983): 317337; Monte
Cook, Descartes Alleged Representationalism, History of Philosophy Quarterly,
Vol. 4, No. 2 (April 1987): 179195; Michael J. Costa, What Cartesian Ideas
are Not, Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 21 (1983): 537549; Thomas
M. Lennon, The Inherence Pattern and Descartes Ideas, Journal of the History
of Philosophy, Vol. 12, No. 1 (1974): 4352; Ian Tipton, Ideas and Knowledge in
Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 13 (1975):
145166; and John W. Yolton, Representation and Realism: Some Reflections
on the Way of Ideas, Mind, Vol. XCVI, No. 383 (July 1987): 318330. For an
excellent response to these approaches and defense of Descartes as representationalist, see Margaret Dualer Wilson, Descartes on Sense and Resemblance, in
Ideas and Mechanism: Essays on Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1999): 1025.
Vere Chappell, The Theory of Ideas, in Essays on Descartes Meditations, ed.
Amlie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986): 179.
VFI 112115.
OC VI 96.
OC I 417, SAT 219.
OC I 414, SAT 217.
OC I 437, SAT 230.
See OC VI 61 and the discussion in Steven Nadler, Malebranche & Ideas
(New York: Oxford University Press 1992): 6266.
OC VI 98.
OC VI 136137.
OC I 442, SAT 232.
OC VI 77.
See Nadler 1989 and other articles from note 15.
OC VI 184.
This does not, of course, mean that he clearly and distinctly cashes out how
his kind of mediation via ideas is supposed to work; the problem of mental
representation was a thorny one for seventeenth-century philosophers, and
Malebranches attempt to answer it is too complex to throw in hereit will be
discussed (if not fully resolved) in Chapter 4.
OC VI 56.
OC VI 56 (Malebranche quoting from The Search).
Radner 1978 6566.
124
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
Notes
OC I 441442, SAT 232.

OC VI 61.
See also OC VIIIIX 925.
Scott 2002 50.
OC VI 65.
OC VI 148.
Emphasis in the original; OC VI 169170.
OC VI 181.
OC VI 81.
OC VI 160.
See OC III 163171, SAT 633638, and OC X 102106.
OC VI 161.
OC VI 105.
OC VI 170.
OC VI 179180.
OC VI 181.
Malebranche blithely states in the Response that human beings desires are
certainly in their power, because without that, it is clear that they wouldnt have
any power, OC VI 47. So it is pretty clear that our power over our desires/our
ability to focus our attention is the key to Malebranchean freedom of both love
and knowledge. See Chapters 4 and 5.
Chapter 4
1
For discussion of this theme in the critical literature, see Gary Hatfield, The
Cognitive Faculties, in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy
Volume II, ed. Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1998): 9531002; The Workings of the Intellect: Mind and
Psychology, in Logic and the Workings of the Mind: The Logic of Ideas and Faculty
Psychology in Early Modern Philosophy Volume 5 North American Kant Society
Studies in Philosophy, ed. Patricia Easton (Atascadero: Ridgeview 1997): 2146;
The Natural and the Normative (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), chapters 1 and 2;
Michael Ayers, Theories of Knowledge and Belief, in Garber and Ayers
10031061.
See Daniel Garber, Semel in vita: The Scientific Background to Descartes Meditations, in Essays on Descartes Meditations, ed. Amlie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1986): 81116; and Gary Hatfield, The Senses
and the Fleshless Eye: The Meditations as Cognitive Exercises, in Rorty 4580.
For an excellent discussion of Arnaulds take on logics role in training our
faculties, see Elmar J. Kremer, Arnauld on Ideas as a Topic in Logic, in Easton
1997 6582.
I use the term rationalist with full acknowledgment that it is an unwieldy
invention of scholarly convenience, albeit a useful one, to lump together
philosophers who privilege the intellect over the senses as our primary source
of true/certain/metaphysically important knowledge.
Notes
5
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
125
Malebranche breaks with Descartes in denying that we have a clear and distinct
perception of the souls essence. See Elucidation 7, OC III 6769, SAT 577578.
However, his overall epistemological framework remains Cartesian.
Ferdinand Alqui, Le Cartsianisme de Malebranche (Paris: Vrin, 1974):
esp. 208212; Andr Robinet, Systme et Existence dans loeuvre de Malebranche
(Paris: Vrin, 1955): esp. 259284. Robinet initiated the discussion of efficacious
ideas; Alqui introduced the terminology of vision en versus vision par
God. Robinet changed his initial date of 1695 as the emergence of the doctrine of efficacious ideas to 1694, thanks to Alquis discovery of a letter dated
January 14, 1694, which states it is precisely what one sees that affects the soul
by its efficaciousness, Alqui 209, OC XVIII 280.
More recently, Tad Schmaltz has also speculated that concerns to answer critics
pushed Malebranche to introduce efficacious ideas to explain how the soul
changes when it apprehends pure ideas in God. Tad Schmaltz, Malebranches
Theory of the Soul: A Cartesian Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press,
1996): 101. Section II will elaborate more on the specific problems critics see a
strong doctrine of efficacious ideas as solving.
Robinet 1955 262 ff.12; Andr Robinet, Variations sur Ide Efficace, in Le
Regard dHenri Gouhier, ed. Denise Leduc-Fayette (Paris: J. Vrin, 1999): 205.
Robinet acknowledges his debt to Henri Gouhier for these ways of describing
illumination (Gouhier in turn followed the lead of Augustinian scholars). See
Henri Gouhier, La Philosophie de Malebranche et son xperience religieuse (Paris:
J. Vrin, 1948): 323325.
Nicholas Jolley, Intellect and Illumination in Malebranche, Journal of the History
of Philosophy, Vol. 32, No. 2 (April 1994): 216; emphasis added.
Ibid., 215.
All translations my own, unless otherwise noted. Although I have preferred to
use my own translations, I have certainly benefited from consulting both Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion, ed. Nicholas Jolley, trans. David Scott
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and The Search After Truth, trans.
Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp (Columbus: Ohio State University
Press, 1980), and will give page references to these translations (henceforth DM
and SAT, respectively) as well, so that the reader may consult them as desired.
OC I 1718, SAT xxiv.
OC XII 33, DM 7. See also OC XVI 58.
See OC I 424, SAT 223.
See OC III 149, SAT 625.
Malebranche argues that God, as being without restriction, can contain the idea
of extension without being formally extended, unlike the soulwhich being
a limited being cannot have extension within her without becoming material,
without being composed of two substances. OC III 148, SAT 624. See also
OC XIII 403.
See OC VII 251.
See OC III 148: Cant you see that there is this difference between God and the
soul of man, that God is the being without restriction, the universal being, the
infinite being, and that the soul is a kind of particular being? It is a property of
the infinite being to be simultaneously one and all things, composed so to speak
126
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
Notes
of an infinity of perfections and so simple that each perfection that He possesses

includes all the others without any real distinction, because as each divine
perfection is infinite, it makes [fait] all of the divine being.
OC XVI 132. See also OC XVI 116122, 138.
See, e.g., Nicholas Jolley, The Light of the Soul: Theories of Ideas in Leibniz,
Malebranche, and Descartes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990): 79; Steven Nadler,
Malebranche and Ideas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992): 96; Richard
A. Watson, Fouchers and de Mairans Critiques of Malebranches Beings of
the Third Kind, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. XXXIV (1996): 126;
and Malebranche and Arnauld on Ideas The Modern Schoolman, Vol. LXXI
(May 1994): 267.
Jolley 1994.
Ibid., 215.
Ibid., 216.
Ibid.
Tad Schmaltz follows a similar line. See his Malebranches Theory of the Soul and
Malebranche on Ideas and the Vision in God, in The Cambridge Companion to
Malebranche, ed. Steven Nadler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2000):
5986.
Alqui 209.
But I speak principally here about material things which certainly cant be united
to our soul, in the way which is necessary so that it can perceive them: because
insofar as they are extended and the soul is not, there is no relation between
them. OC I 417, SAT 219. See also OC II 100, SAT 320, OC 6:231, and the discussion in Nadler 1992 7173, which helped clarify my thoughts on this point.
It is evident that bodies are not at all visible by themselves; that they cannot act
on our mind nor represent themselves to it. This needs no proof; this may be
discovered by simple view without need of reasoning, because the least attention
of the mind to the clear idea of matter suffices to discover it. OC III 127,
SAT 612. Consult the idea of extension: and judge by this idea that represents
bodies, or nothing represents them, if it can have any other property than the
passive faculty of receiving diverse shapes and movements. Isnt it totally obvious
that all the properties of extension can only consist in relations of distance?
OC XIII 150, DM 107. See also OC II 312323, SAT 448449, OC XIII 150155,
DM 107111.
Schmaltz 1996 100.
Robinet 1955 167168.
See OC XII 116, cited in Jolley I 218 from DM 77. Tad Schmaltz also discusses
this passage: see Schmaltz 1996 104. It is worth noting that Schmaltz does not
follow Jolleys line of completely rejecting all mental faculties: see Schmaltz 1996
98101.
OC XII 116, DM 77.
God is not a bundle of ideasthis would violate the divine simplicity.
Malebranche argues that every idea or perfection in God, being infinite, contains or includes all of the others. Although the details of this mysterious unity
defy human comprehension, our reason does allow us to grasp that this must be
so, as only such simplicity is worthy of the infinitely perfect being.
Notes
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
127
In an independently developed paper, Andrew Pessin argues that: Ideas are

identical to possible divine volitions . . . [d]ivine volitions are conceptually
distinguishable states or aspects (though not modes) of God which are primitively possessed of intentional or representational content, and by which
God acts or manifests His efficacity; and they are possible insofar as they are
considered independently of whether they are exercised or actualized or undertaken by God. Andrew Pessin, Malebranche on Ideas, manuscript, 2. Pessin
holds that this reading of Malebranche on ideas allows us to reconcile his strong
sounding talk of efficacious ideas and his belief that God acts via his will/divine
volitions. I will leave it to Pessin himself to flesh out his complex argument.
However, I believe that it fits with the account I am developing, by rejecting the
view of ideas as agents with efficacy independent of the divine will.
Here it may help to call upon Suarez, whose Metaphysical Disputation (18)
Malebranche engages in Elucidation 15 of the Search. According to Suarez,
when using a conceptual distinction, we think about one thing in different ways,
or consider different aspects of the same object. Suarez defines a conceptual
distinction as a distinction that does not formally and actually intervene
between the things designated as distinct, as they exist in themselves, but only
as they exist in our concepts, from which they receive their name, as cited in
Suarez on Individuation: Metaphysical Disputation V: Individual Unity and Its
Principle, trans. with introduction and notes by Jorge J.E. Gracia (Milwaukee:
Marquette University Press, 1982): 13. Gracia explains that these different
aspects [of the distinction/object under consideration] arise either through
mental repetition and comparison or through some inadequacy in conception, ibid., 12.
See Gary Hatfield in Rorty 1986.
Here I am in agreement with Nadler 1992 6.
Alqui 211.
Ibid.; emphasis added.
As Gouhier elegantly describes this, Avec un langage forg pour la vie des sens,
Malebranche sapproche des choses spirituelles et essaie de les rendre transparentes; nous de rpondre son effort en transcendent ce langage pour saisir les
choses spirituelles, pour capter sa pense avant toute expression. Alors nous
verrons peut-etre quune ide nest pas ncessairement attache une seul mtaphore, quune meme ide sest glise sous plusieurs images, que le philosophe
comme lartiste a essay plusieurs formes, et ce sont toutes ces formes, et non
une seule, qui, sclairant les unes les autres, doivent nous conduire la perception sereine o Malebranche sest repos, 314.
OC XVI 119.
OC XV 9; emphasis added.
Robinet 274.
OC XVI 66; my emphasis. See also OC XVI 67.
OC XII 155.
OC II 316, SAT 450.
OC III 205, SAT 658; emphasis added.
OC XVI 132.
Schmaltz 1996 79.
128
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
Notes
Emphasis added; Nadler 1992 77. In the same book, see also note 28 on p. 77
and note 30 on p. 79.
Nadler 1992 176. For the full account, see Nadler 1992 chapter 5, 152182.
For a critical response to Nadlers account, see David Scott, Malebranches
Indirect Realism: A Critique of Steven Nadler, British Journal for the History of
Philosophy, Vol. 4 (1996): 5378. For commentators who interpret Malebranche
as holding a representative theory of perception, see Gueroult, Malebranche
Vol. 1, 8890; Nicolas Jolley, The Light of the Soul (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990):
8598; McRae, Idea as a Philosophical Term in the Seventeenth Century,
Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 26 (1965): 175184; Daisie Radner, Malebranche
(Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1978): 1214; Genenive Rodis-Lewis, Nicolas
Malebranche (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963).
My thanks to an anonymous reviewer of the Journal of the History of Philosophy for
pointing out how Nadlers interpretation might be seen as buttressing my own
case contra Jolley.
Jolley 1990 87.
Ibid., 77. Jolley goes on to argue that because Malebranche assimilates causal
and logical relations, his claim that perceptions logically depend on ideas
turns into the thesis that perception are causally dependent as well. See ibid.,
7778. Yet Malebranche does not conflate logic and ontology: his point is that
real power must ground the link between cause and effect, power so great as to
guarantee their connection. And rational analysis of the concepts of finite matter, finite mind, and God quickly reveal that only Gods omnipotence can fill the
bill. Yet this is a metaphysical point, not a mere logical one. The young Leibniz
may have mistakenly drawn metaphysical implications from his logically based
concept containment theory, but Malebranche did not make the same mistake. As I mentioned at the outset, the term rationalist is a device of scholarly
convenience; but we should not miss the important differences among early
modern philosophers by forcing their similarities. For the predicate-in-notion
principle, see Discourse on Metaphysics 8, in G.W. Leibniz: Philosophical Essays, trans.
Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1989): 4041.
OC I 10, SAT XIX.
OC I 16, SAT XXIV.
Martial Gueroult, Malebranche. 3 Vols (Paris: Aubier, 1959): 179.
OC XIII 407.
In the third edition of the Search Malebranche wrote Moreover, one sees or one
senses a body, when its idea, that is to say, when some shape of general and
intelligible extension becomes sensible and particular by color, or some other
sensible quality, the soul attaches to it OC III 152, ff. This is the passage Arnauld
attacks. Malebranche revised the phrase to read Moreover, one sees or one
senses a body, when its idea, that is to say, when some shape of general and
intelligible extension becomes sensible and particular by the color, or by some
other sensible perception with which its idea affects the soul and that the soul
attaches to it. OC III 152. Malebranche specifies a page-and-a-half later that
I say that we see all things in God by the efficacy of his substance, and in particular sensible objects, by Gods applying intelligible extension to our mind in a
thousand different ways. OC III 154; my emphasis.
Notes
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
129

OC VI 125.
See OC II 314318, OC III 241243, OC XII 319.
God, in consequence of the laws of the union of the soul and body and always
exactly following the laws of Optics and Geometry, touches, by the idea of
extension he encloses, our spirit with this variety of colors, by which we judge
of the actual existence and diversity of objects. OC IV 76. See also OC VI 61,
OC XIII 46.
Jolley 1994 219.
OC VI 118; emphasis added. See also OC XII 54.
Schmaltz does explicitly state that he does not follow Jolleys line of completely
rejecting all mental faculties; as will be seen in the remaining discussion, this still
does not escape the fundamental tension a strong reading of efficacious ideas
places on Malebranches occasionalist metaphysics and rationalist commitments
to the human faculties of intellect and volition. See Schmaltz 1996 98101.
Robinet 1955 263.
OC XII 51, DM 21; emphasis added. See also OC XII 55.
The details of how precisely the relationship between the idea of intelligible
extension and the sensory modification yields a representative perception is a
difficult point of interpretation in Malebranche scholarship. For the purposes of
this chapter, however, the mechanics of sensory perception are not essential. For
more on this issue, see Fred Ablondi, Le Spinoziste Malgr Lui?: Malebranche, de
Mairan, and Intelligible Extension, History of Philosophy Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 2
(April 1998): 191203; Steven Nadler, Arnauld and the Cartesian Philosophy of Ideas
(Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1989); and Jean Laporte, Ltendue intelligible selon Malebranche, (Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 1938).
See also OC IV 72. I say in a sense that He [God] is seen: because ideas of creatures are not the substance of the Divinity taken absolutely, but perceived insofar
as imperfectly participable.
OC XV 23; emphasis added.
OC I 437, SAT 230.
OC I 437, SAT 230.
OC 171 303.
OC I 9798, SAT 319.
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theolgica, trans. Anton C. Pegis in Basic Writings of
St. Thomas Aquinas: Volume I (New York: Random House, 1944): 164165. For
more on participation in Aquinas, see James Ross, Religious Language, in
Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Brain Davies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993): 106135; R.A. te Velde, Participation and Substantiality in Thomas
Aquinas (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995); and John F. Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought
of Thomas Aquinas (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of American Press,
2000): 94131. Malebranche also discusses the concept of participation in OC IV
101 and in the Preface to the Dialogues (added in 1696), OC XII 1213, 24.
Monte Cook offers a similar interpretation of Malebranche on this point: see
Monte Cook, The Ontological Status of Malebranchean Ideas, Journal of the
History of Philosophy, Vol. XXXVI, No. 4 (October 1998): 525544.
130
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
Notes
To be fair to Malebranche, he is at least no worse off than his contemporaries

on this scoreI follow Nadler on this point when he argues that the way in
which an idea presents or displays a content, and thereby makes present (or
represents) to the mind some (absent) object, is basic and inexplicable in terms
of the way in which other kinds of representations present their content. This is
true for Malebranche, and it is also true for Descartes, Arnauld, and Rgis.
Nadler 1992 4950.
Sensory perception depends upon the impact of other bodies with our organs,
and as such is governed by laws of bodybody union for Malebranche (even
the natural judgments that correspond to Descartes third grade of sensory
perception, and presuppose unnoticed intellectual activity, are passive and
given to us by God). However, we could will to focus our visual attention more
closely on an object before us, and this desire would be the occasion for the
subsequent motion of our eyes, according to the laws of mindbody union.
Detailed discussion of the metaphysics of sensory perception is beyond the scope
of the chapter.
OC VI 177178.
Jolley 1994 216; emphasis added.
OC I 76, SAT 79.
See OC XII 289290: It is thus our attention that is the occasional and natural
cause of the presence of ideas to our mind, in consequence of the general laws of
its union with universal Reason. And God established it thus, with the design that
he had to make us perfectly free and capable of meriting Heaven . . . if we were
not at all masters of our attention, or if our attention were not the natural cause
of our ideas, we would not be free, nor able to merit. Because we would not even
be able to suspend our consent, because we wouldnt have the power to consider
the reasons that would lead us to suspend it. Now God wanted us to be free, not
only because this quality is necessary for us to merit Heaven, for which we were
made, but also because he wanted to let shine the wisdom of his Providence and
his quality of Scrutinizer of hearts, in using free causes as happily as necessary
ones in the execution of his designs. Malebranche also makes this claim about
God using free causes just as well as necessary ones in executing his designs in
On Physical Premotion, OC XVI 142. For a discussion of the various general laws
governing the orders of Nature and Grace, see Rodis-Lewis 296300.
OC XVI 48;, emphasis added. See also OC XVI 49.
OC XVI, 47. See also OC XVI 33, 35, 37, 38, 40, 41, 44, 45, 48, 50, 56, 66, 71, 77,
and 141. See Chapter 5.
OC I 407, SAT 212.
OC XVI 141.
As briefly discussed later, according to Malebranche, the human will is the
impression or natural impulse that carries us toward the general and indeterminate good (which happens to be God, but may not be apprehended as such).
Thus it is not in our power to will or not to willfor it is not in our power not
to love the good in general, not to wish to be happy (OC I 4647, SAT 45).
However, we are free to love/consent or not to any particular good. For we can
recognize that any particular good does not satisfy our desire for the good in
general: since a particular good does not contain all other goods, and since the
Notes
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
131
mind when it considers this good clearly and distinctly cannot believe that it
contains them all, God does not lead us necessarily or invincibly to the love of
this good (OC III 18, SAT 548). [W]e can always withhold our consent and
seriously examine whether the good we are enjoying is or is not the true good
(OC III 20, SAT 549).
OC XIII 434.
OCM I 43, SAT 3; OCM I 46, SAT 45.
OCM I 20, SAT XXV.
OCM I 16, SAT XXIV; emphasis added.
Jolley 1994 211. This claim about the status of sensation is controversial in its
own right. The teleological language in the Search and the Dialogues suggests that
the senses are not altogether disordered and their deliverances are given to us
for the good of the body, to signal what the soul should do to preserve the life of
the soulbody composite. See especially The Search 1.1.5 and the Dialogues,
dialogues 1 and 6. For an account arguing that Descartes held sensations to
be representational, despite their failure to give us certain knowledge or truth,
see Alison Simmons developed account of the biological/ecological function
of sensations in Descartes, Are Cartesian Sensations Representational? Nous,
Vol. 33, No. 3 (1999): 347369. See also Tad Schmaltzs discussion of the role of
these senses and imagination in drawing our attention to the idea of extension,
Schmaltz 1996 103108.
Jolley 1994 212.
Emphasis in the original; OCM III 144145, SAT 622.
OCM III 145, SAT 622623.
Jolley 1994 215.
OC XIII 288289, DM 226; emphasis added.
Robinet 1955 283.
Ibid., 259 ff 2; emphasis added.
Ibid.
OC VI 63; emphasis added.
OC VI 64; emphasis added.
See OC XIII 187188, DM 139140.
It is worth noting that in the 1707 edition of Christian and Metaphysical
Meditations, which Malebranche himself explicitly recommended in the 1712
Avertissement of the Search After Truth, this citation remains unmodified, suggesting
that Malebranche still held to this view.
OC X 152; emphasis added.
OC I 910, SAT XIX.
OC XVI 105.
OC XVI 111112; my emphasis. Malebranche also puts the point positively a
few pages earlier, stating that the cult of intelligences, capable of thought
and of volition, consists only in judgments conformed to those of God Himself
and in movements regulated according to the immutable order of justice,
OC XVI 107. See also OC IV 65.
See Chapter 5.
Gary Hatfield, Attention in Early Scientific Psychology, in Visual Attention, ed.
Richard D. Wright (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998): 325, p. 7.
132
113
Notes
Many thanks to the following people for comments on various drafts of this
chapter: Stephen T. Davis, Lisa Downing, Sean Greenberg, Gary Hatfield, John
Heil, Marc Hight, Amy Kind, Mark Kulstad, Charles McCracken, and James Ross,
and anonymous reviewers from The Journal of the History of Philosophy for detailed
feedback and suggestions. Any imperfections, of course, are the authors own.
Chapter 5
1
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
For a chronological analysis of Malebranches account of human freedom, see

Tad Schmaltz, Human Freedom and Divine Creation in Malebranche, Descartes and the Cartesians, British Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 2, No. 2
(1994): 3550. Fred Ablondi and Davis Scott mainly focus on the account in
The Search after Truth and the First Elucidation to The Search: see Fred Ablondi,
Causality and Human Freedom in Malebranche, Philosophy and Theology, Vol. 9,
No. 34 (1996): 321331; and David Scott, Malebranche on the Souls Power,
Studia Leibnitiana, Band XXVIII/1 (1996): 3757. Paul Hoffman focuses
exclusively on the account in The Search; see his Three Dualist Theories of the
Passions, Philosophical Topics, Vol. 19, No. 1 (Spring 1991): 182200.
In choosing the term immanent, Malebranche is drawing on a medieval distinction between transeunt and immanent causation that would have been
familiar to him from Suarezs Metaphysical Disputations, a work he attacked in
Elucidation 15 of the Search. See Francisco Suarez, On Efficient Causality: Metaphysical Disputations 17, 18, 19, trans. Alfred J. Freddoso (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1994): 131177. See discussion in final section of this chapter.
See, e.g., Timothy OConnor, Agent Causation, in Agents, Causes & Events:
Essays on Indeterminism and Free Will, ed. Timothy OConnor (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1995): 173200; William Rowe, Thomas Reid on Freedom &
Morality (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991); and Thomas Reid: Critical
Interpretations, ed. Stephen F. Barker and Tom L. Beauchamp (Philadelphia:
Philosophical Monographs, 1976).
Translation: Of the action of God on creatures: a treatise in which one proves
physical premotion by reason. And where one examines many questions that
concern the nature of minds and grace. The work is in multiple volumes: upon
examining it I concur with Malebranches various complaints that it is as longwinded as its title.
See OC III 31, SAT 554555.
OC XVI 4, 41, 46. All translations from OC XVI are the authors.
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica I Q 82, articles 1 & 2, in The Basic Writings
of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Volume One, ed. and trans. Anton C. Pegis (New York:
Random House, 1944), 777780.
OC XVI 56, 17, 38, 4748.
OC XVI 17. See also OC V 118119, 121, TNG 170, 173 and OC VII 566.
OC XVI 4, 31, 42, 4647, 50.
OC XVI 5, see also OC V 120, TNG 172.
OC I 49, SAT 7.
OC I 4950, SAT 78.
Notes
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
133
OC I 52, SAT 8. See also OC XI 2224, OC XII 191.

OC I 53, LO 9.
OC I 5455, SAT 10. Malebranche does admit that in matters of contingent
truth, such as history, local custom, or grammar, we have to be satisfied with
greatest probability (OC I 63, SAT 15); and sometimes when we need to act or in
the face of a good deal of probabilistic knowledge it is alright to believe, and to
go on investigating (OC I 56, LO 11). Still, we make the required use of our freedom when we withhold our consent until the voice of reason tells us to give it.
See also OCM 1:5558, SAT 1012, OCM XI 7677, 155; and Jean-Cristophe
Bardout, A reception without attachment: Malebranche confronting Cartesian
Morality, trans. Sarah A. Miller and Patrick L. Miller, Receptions of Descartes:
Cartesianism and Anti-Cartesianism in Early Modern Europe, ed. Tad M. Schmatlz
(London: Routledge, 2005): 4362.
OC I 55, SAT 10.
Ibid.
See the first Elucidation to The Search OC III 31, SAT 554. Several times in
On Physical Premotion, Malebranche specifically tells the reader to return to this
earlier work for more discussion (see, e.g., OC XVI 6, 22, 24).
OC III 31, SAT 555.
Dictionnaire de Thologie Catholique, Volume 13, Part I (Preexistence to Puy,
Archangel of), ed. A. Vacant, E. Mangenot, and E. Amann, Premotion
Physique by R. Garrigou-Lagrange (Paris: Librairie Letouzey et Ane, 1936):
39; emphasis added. Henceforth DC. All translations my own.
DC 40.
Ibid. See also the helpful discussion of the sixteenth-century Scholastic
debate surrounding physical premotion in Robert Sleigh, Jr., Vere Chappell,
and Michael Della Rocca, Determinism and Human Freedom, in The
Cambridge Companion to the 17th Century (Oxford: Cambridge University Press,
1998): 11951278, 12001206. Henceforth Sleigh et al.
DC 40.
OC XVI 7; emphasis added.
OC XVI 8.
See, e.g., OC XVI 28 and 39.
I say infamous because these kinds of naturalistic analogies between the realms
of nature and grace infuriated Malebranches critics, who thought he was allowing Cartesian-style physics to encroach on religious turf; such critics also attacked
Malebranche for presuming to know the modus operandi of divine grace. See
Patrick Rileys informative introduction to his translation of The Treatise on Nature
and Grace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992): 1103, esp. 2729.
OC V 5051; Nicolas Malebranche, Treatise on Nature and Grace, trans. Patrick
Riley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992): 129130. Henceforth TNG.
It is important to note that Malebranche unequivocally holds that Jesus Christ is
the only meritorious cause of our salvation. When Malebranche talks about
humans meriting or demeriting, he is focusing on them as praiseworthy or
blameworthy, not as deserving or earning salvation on their own meritthe
Pelagian heresy. But since all men are enveloped in original sin, and they are by
their nature infinitely beneath God, it is only Jesus Christ who, by the dignity of
134
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
Notes
his person and the holiness of his sacrifice, can have access to his Father,
reconcile us with him, and merit his favours for us. Thus it is Jesus Christ alone
who can be the meritorious cause of grace. OC V 66, TNG 138139. See also
OC VII 415416.
OC V 54, TNG 132.
OC V 55, TNG 133.
OC V 66, TNG 138.
OC V 97, TNG 151.
Thus I disagree with Sleighs claim that the grace de sentiment [grace of Jesus
Christ] is the variety of grace that moves the will, and hence, is more relevant to
freedom. Sleigh et al. 1240. Besides this assertion, I cannot make out an argument in Sleigh for this claim. Perhaps he means that since the grace of Christ
produces pleasure or pain that serve as material motives for our soul, when we
can then consent to or withhold our consent from, this grace directly facilitates
our freedom. However, since he does not discuss the grace of the Creator and
our role in occasioning that grace, I cannot assess his reasons for holding this
grace (by implication of the earlier statement) less relevant to freedom.
OC XVI 9.
OC XVI 10.
Ibid.
Ibid.
OC XVI 11.
OC V 9798, TNG 152.
OC I 407, SAT 212. See also OC III 3940, SAT 559, OC X 146, 148, OC XII 289,
DM 227.
OC I 440441, SAT 232.
Elmar J. Kremer, Malebranche on Human Freedom, in The Cambridge Companion to Malebranche, ed. Steven Nadler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2000): 190219, p. 205.
OC XI; Nicolas Malebranche, Treatise on Ethics, trans. Craig Walton (Dordrecht:
Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992): 48. Henceforth TE.
OC V 99, TNG 153.
OC XI 22, TE 48.
OC XI 23, TE 49.
OC XI 2325, TE 4950.
OC XI 34, TE 57.
OC V 102, TNG 155.
See OC XI 5969, TE 7582.
OC V 118, TNG 169.
OC V 163, TNG 208.
OC V 164, TNG 209; emphasis added.
See OC V 118119, TNG 170.
OC XI 71, TE 84.
OC XI 79, TE 89.
See OC V 121, TNG 173. See also OC VII 566568.
Notes
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
135
OC V 122, TNG 174.

OC V 124126, TNG 176177.
OC V 129, TNG 180.
OC V 130, TNG 180.
See OC XVI 5557.
See OC 11: 4142, TE viviii.
Emphasis added; OC XI 49, TE 66. For more in-depth discussion of proper
choice and proper love in Malebranche, see Jean Michel Vienne, Malebranche
and Locke: The Theory of Moral Choice, a Neglected Theme, in Nicolas
Malebranche: His Philosophical Critics and Successors, ed. Stuart Brown (Assen: Van
Gorcum, 1991): 94108; Kremer 2000; and Jean-Christophe Bardout, La vertu de
la philosophie: Essai sur la moral de Malebranche (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 2000).
OC V 133, TNG 183.
As Lvy-Bruhl glosses this, Gods will, to be sure, makes us seek our own happiness, but it does not make us seek it in the gratification of the senses rather than
in obedience to Himself. Lucien Lvy-Bruhl, History of Modern Philosophy in
France (New York: Burt Franklin/Lenox Hill Publishing, 1977 reprint): 73.
OC V 135, TNG 184.
OC V 139, TNG 188; emphasis added.
Ibid.
Ibid.
OC XVI 18.
Ibid.
Ibid., 35.
Ibid., 50.
Ibid., 46.
Ibid., 47.
Ibid.
Ibid., 38.
When the will does consent, it only acquiesces or remains with the good it
judges the best: In a word, if consenting is nothing other than a species of rest,
which the soul wants to take without examination, or after certain examination,
of the physical motives that solicit it, which I think I have sufficiently proven in
the [first elucidation to] The Search After Truth; it seems to me that a new physical
premotion [i.e., a new modality] to determine its consent would be quite
useless (ibid., 2223). Our consenting is a moral action, which does not cause
any real change, no new perception, sensation, or impulse. As such, giving our
consent requires no physically efficacious force or true causal power on our part.
Giving consent is merely a resting with one or another physical motives that God
has already produced in us.
See ibid., 6, 4143.
Ibid., 66.
OC I 461, SAT 244.
Emphasis added; OC XVI 2930. See also OC III 31, SAT 554, and OC VII 568.
See OC III 163171, SAT 633638, OC X 102106.
OC XVI 21.
136
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
Notes
See OC III 2, OC IX 981, OC X 61, and OC XVI 38.

OC VI 163.
OC XVI 20.
Ibid., 85.
Ibid., 87.
Ibid., 94.
Ibid., 98.
Ibid., 99.
Ibid., 101.
For further explanation, see Chapter 2.
OC XII 69, DM 36.
Suarez, 137 and 165.
For an in-depth discussion of Suarezs impact on Descartes, see Tad Schmatlz,
Descartes on Causation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008): 147.
Alfred J. Freddoso, Mediaval Aristotelianism and the Case against Secondary
Causation in Nature, in Divine and Human Action: Essays in the Metaphysics of
Theism, ed. Thomas V. Morris (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988): 74118,
p. 83.
OC II 315, SAT 449; emphasis added.
OC II 315.
OC III 225, SAT 669; emphasis added.
See Roderick Chisholm, Human Freedom and the Self, in Free Will, ed. Robert
Kane (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2002): 4659.
I borrow this term from E.J. Lowe, A Survey of Metaphysics (Oxford: Oxford
University Press 2002): 198. See also Arthur C. Danto, Basic Actions, American
Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 2 (1965): 141148.
OC I 10, SAT XXXIV. See also OC VI 137.
My gratitude goes out to Sylvia Walsh for timely and thoughtful comments on
this chapter.
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Index
Aquinas, St. Thomas (Thomists) 801,

92, 95, 98, 107, 129
Aristotelian Scholastics (Peripatetics) 4, 13,
17, 67, 86, 115
Arnauld, Antoine 6, 11, 27, 38, 4566,
701, 77, 956, 11819.
attention 5, 10, 22, 47, 6589
(especially 829)
Augustine, St. 2, 4, 12, 15, 61, 64, 978,
107, 113
God, qua infinitely perfect being 2, 56,

1519, 256, 2930, 44, 57, 79, 101
qua Divine Reason/Word 6, 21, 247,
29, 75
grace 367, 467, 967
of enlightenment/creator 98100, 103
of feeling/Christ 978, 100, 134
Berkeley, George 3
Brulle, Cardinal 1
body
essence of 5, 89, 76
Boursier, Laurent 91112, 1067
ideas
definition of 1213
Divine 55, 61, 65, 6989
efficacious 12, 20, 6889
innate 1416, 48
Imagio Dei doctrine 2, 878, 91, 105, 111
intelligibility 1112, 567, 712
intelligible extension 910, 1921, 56, 60,
63, 79
Cartesian 1, 3, 17, 223, 467, 524, 67,

70, 85
cause
immanent 91112
occasional 45, 9, 12
real/true/transeunt 46, 111
consent 5, 929
continuous creation, doctrine of 1, 9, 16,
33, 39, 43
Descartes, Ren 1, 11, 1718, 24, 26, 478,
50, 63, 67, 72, 105, 107
and free creation of eternal
truths 278, 107
Hobbes, Thomas 107

Hume, David 3, 5
knowledge
by idea vs. sentiment 63, 1056
of soul vs. of body 634, 1056
laws of motion 5, 7, 10
Leibniz, Gottfried 3, 31, 38, 42, 11718,
11819
Locke, John 3, 107
love
natural vs. free 1023
of union vs. of esteem 1023
error 84
avoidance of 93
sensory 1213
sin 36, 93, 96, 1023, 106
mind/body union 810, 77

modification 59, 6970, 105
moral vs. physical 92, 95, 94, 10312
freedom 2, 11, 22, 829, 90112
necessary connection 46, 111
general law 68, 10, 3840, 45, 967

general vs. particular volitions 7, 24,
3245, 967
objective being 504, 578

occasionalism, doctrine of 110, 56
omnipotence/divine will 59, 30, 745
144
Index
Oratory 1
order 2432, 345, 45, 57, 99100, 1067
Suarez, Francisco 108, 136

substance 6970, 105
participation in divine ideas 30, 7981

Paul, St. 11, 44
perception
intellectual 1721, 50, 687, 829
sensory 1022, 56, 6978, 829
physical premotion 908, 133
theodicy/problem of evil 78, 24,

367, 967
Rgis, Pierre Sylvain 71, 80

relations of magnitude vs. relations of
perfection 256, 99
understanding, faculty of 10, 92

vision in God, doctrine of 2, 1022,
256, 5566
will, faculty of 10, 84, 923

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Nicolas Malebranche

Continuum Studies in Philosophy

Continuum International Publishing Group

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Malebranches Metaphysics and the Problem of Human Freedom

God, Order, and General Volitions

Arnauld and Malebranche on the Power of the Human Intellect

The Union of the Divine and the Human Minds

Attending to Malebranches Agent Causation

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My thanks to Stetson University for granting me a sabbatical leave in fall

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Malebranches Metaphysics and the

Nicolas Malebranche was born in Paris on August 6, 1638, and died on

progresses, its essence is present in the first chapter of Malebranches first

Malebranches Metaphysics and Human Freedom

and the eighteenth centuries on the continent.5 As Etienne Gilson correctly

Malebranches Metaphysics and Human Freedom

Malebranches Metaphysics and Human Freedom

suffering as well as to unpack the philosophical problem of God as true

Malebranches Metaphysics and Human Freedom

Theodore is pushing Aristes (and the reader) to acknowledge that the

So we move from a negative discussion of what creatures cannot do to a

II. The Vision in God

Malebranches Metaphysics and Human Freedom

God, thenas an explanation of sensory perception and of intellectual

Further, Malebranche accepts the Augustinian stricture that the lower

Malebranches Metaphysics and Human Freedom

in the desertit is necessary that something be present to the mind in such

create its own ideas from material impressions, it would be performing a

Malebranches Metaphysics and Human Freedom

be able to determine precisely which among the infinite number of its

Malebranches Metaphysics and Human Freedom

allow human minds to see everything by revealing what in Him is related

the nature of a triangle, from experience of particular beings; for no matter

Malebranches Metaphysics and Human Freedom

this phenomenon, according to Malebranche. As finite creatures cannot

God makes possible our inhabitation of a meaningful universe; it allows us

Malebranches Metaphysics and Human Freedom

material and intelligible world, as if my computer has a mirror-intelligible

and Religion, where Malebranche places additional emphasis on the extent

Malebranches Metaphysics and Human Freedom

mechanized. Malebranche, however, wants to preserve human freedom,

God, Order, and General Volitions

Having laid out Malebranches general metaphysical picture in Chapter 1,

God, Order, and General Volitions

I. God and Order

God, Order, and General Volitions

make them. They make up the Reason that is consubstantial with

God, Order, and General Volitions

God, Order, and General Volitions

beat least in principlea rational explanation for everything that occurs

II. Introduction to God and General Volitions

God, Order, and General Volitions

God, Order, and General Volitions

passive resignation in the face of natural disasters:

God, Order, and General Volitions

them even more criminal, He would lack goodness. Indeed, Malebranche

III. Analysis of Gods General Willing and Occasionalism

God, Order, and General Volitions

result of some general volitions by God at creation with regard to the

Clarke objects to attributing to God the potentially infinite number of