[Susan Peppers-Bates] Nicolas Malebranche Freedom(BookFi.org)

Nicolas Malebranche

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Nicolas MalebrancheFreedom in an Occasionalist World

Susan Peppers-Bates

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© Susan Peppers-Bates 2009

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ISBN: HB: 978–1-8470–6189-8

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication DataPeppers-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, 1638–1715. I. Title.

B1897.P47 2009194–dc22 2009002044

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Contents

Acknowledgments vii

1 Malebranche’s Metaphysics and the Problem of Human Freedom 1

2 God, Order, and General Volitions 24

3 Arnauld and Malebranche on the Power of the Human Intellect 46

4 The Union of the Divine and the Human Minds 67

5 Attending to Malebranche’s 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 fi nish 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 com-mented 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 Hatfi eld, 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 God—in whom we live and move and have our being.

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Chapter 1

Malebranche’s 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 well-established, noble (several of his uncles were lawyers in service of the Crown) Catholic family (his mother’s relative Madame de Acarie founded the Carmelite order of nuns in France). The fi nancial stability and piety of his family allowed this frail, youngest son to pursue his studies. After receiving his “maître ès arts” from Collège 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 Bérulle 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. Père André, his fi rst biographer, tells us that Malebranche’s 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 René Descartes. While perusing the booksellers on Rue Saint Jacques, Malebranche picked up a copy of Traité de L’Homme—and 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 (1674–75) is the fi rst product of a long, prolifi c philosophical career.1 Malebranche’s 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

2 Nicolas Malebranche

progresses, its essence is present in the fi rst chapter of Malebranche’s fi rst 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 Malebranche’s occasionalism and his vision in God taken together appear to account both for creation’s 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 freedomto use them that human beings possess refl ect the image of the divine power. God’s love for His own infi nitely perfect being means that because He created us, He made us to love and to know Him.

These subtle points of Malebranche’s position, and many of the fundamental tenets of his ontology that follow are explained in detail and analyzed in the succeeding chapters of the book—for now I want to get the Malebranchean fundamentals out on the table. Accordingly, this chapter sketches out Malebranche’s basic metaphysics and introduces the book’s general problem space: the aim of the book as a whole is to gain a detailed philosophical understanding and evaluation of Malebranche’s efforts to provide a plausible account of human intellectual and moral agency in the context of his commitment to an infi nitely perfect being possessing all casual power.

Malebranche’s relative obscurity in the contemporary Anglo-American canon is stunning, given his importance and fame in both the seventeenth

Malebranche’s Metaphysics and Human Freedom 3

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

Malebranche . . . is not to be neglected if the history of modern metaphysicsis 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 prin-ciple 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 McCracken’s book Malebranche and British Philosophy documents Malebranche’s infl uence on British fi gures ranging from Norris to Reid. McCracken brings to light such little known facts as Locke’s consideration of a new chapter to the second edition of the Essay rebutting Malebranche’s vision in God and his composition of the Examination of Père Malebranche’s Opinion of Seeing All Things in God.8

As to Malebranche’s infl uence on Hume, McCracken notes that:

David Hume urged his friend Michael Ramsay, in preparation for a reading of Hume’s just-completed Treatise of Human Nature, to study Malebranche’s Search. If Ramsay took Hume’s 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 Hume’s book.9

Additionally, André Robinet meticulously documents the correspondence and mutual philosophical infl uence between Malebranche and Leibniz (who engages Malebranche’s ideas directly in both 1686’s Discourse on Meta-physics and 1710’s Theodicy).10 All of these facts—and more could be given—attest to Malebranche’s importance to the history of modern philosophy;


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 Malebranche’s 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 Malebranche’s unique analyses of causation, sensory and intellectual perception, and of God’s 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 effi cacious 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” substan-tial 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 diffi cult 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 Malebranche’s 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 effi cacious 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 modifi es 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 situation”17 (as exemplifi ed 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 that—with the notable exception of the human mind’s powers of non-consent and attention18—only 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 infi nitely 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 fi nite and does not have the power to guarantee that its willings are always carried out—again, only an infi nite power could make such a guarantee. Malebranche adds the empirical point that we do not observe that our willings are always necessar-ily followed by bodily motions or the intellectual focus that we desire. Finally, when we unpack the idea of an infi nitely perfect and all-powerful being, it is evident to our reason that such a being’s willings must always


be fulfi lled. Only in God do we fi nd the necessary link between cause and effect—so only here do we fi nd 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, God’s will is necessarily effi cacious. How could God be called omnipotent if He willed something and it failed to come to pass? By unpacking the idea of infi nitely 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 effi cacy 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 ineffi cacious wills.24

This theme of faith and philosophy working together to help us fi nd the proper path to intellectual and spiritual enlightenment resonates through-out Malebranche’s works—though 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 ramifi cations.

Indeed, Malebranche’s 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 infi nitely perfect being. Adding to his earlier emphasis of the necessary connection between divine willings and their execution, Malebranche points out that an infi nitely perfect being is “able to act only for His own glory.”26 Next, Malebranche argues that since the world is fi nite, it is not worthy of the action of God—thus only the mediation of Christ, the God-man, can make the world worthy of its creator.27


The details behind Malebranche’s views about why God chose to create the world, however, are not our main concern.28 Rather, my concern is Malebranche’s argument from the idea of God to specifi c 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 God’s wisdom reveals to Him all possible works and ways of creating them. His wills are necessarily effi cacious: 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 infi nite treasures of His wisdom an infi nity 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 infi nity 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 fi elds 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 God’s will, instantiated in the general laws of nature, thus serves to apologize for the theological problem of evil and


suffering as well as to unpack the philosophical problem of God as true cause. Malebranche does not just want to justify God’s 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, effi cacious will and occasional causes becomes clearer in Malebranche’s later work Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion (1688). Cast in dialogue form, this work plays Malebranche’s presumed mouthpiece, Theodore, against his initially naïve-sounding pupil Aristes. (Later things get livened up a bit by the entrance of a third interlocutor, Theotimus, a brighter pupil of Theodore’s.) 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 effi cacious divine will. The two key principles behind his argument to establish the ineffi cacy 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 effi cacy 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 effi cacy 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 effi cacy of which they could act on the mind—this 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 fi gure. Extension will be capable of having modalities other than distance.36

Theodore treats this reasoning as a reductio ad absurdam—for 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 mind–body “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 other—or 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 stuff—even supposing for argument’s 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 God—though omnipotent—cannot create a body which is nowhere or which does not have certain relations of distance to other bodies.”38 Yet God’s 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 creation—whereby creatures come from nothing into existence and stay there—is 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 fi nite 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 effi cacious 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 effi cacious 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 Himself—occasional causes, I say, which determine the effi cacy 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


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 effi cacy in the material realm.

The impenetrability of bodies and their impact merely serve as an occasion for God’s 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 effi cacious, 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 discus-sion 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 God’s continuously present and effi cacious 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 God’s general laws does not concern only the case of matter. Free occasional causes or minds also fi gure prominently in Malebranche’s 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 infi nite being capable of actually possessing: (1) the infi nite idea of extension presupposed in all sensory awareness; and (2) the idea of unlimited being presupposed in all intellectual generaliza-tion and abstraction in the fi rst 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 God’s action upon matter.

Therefore, I disagree with Thomas M. Lennon’s 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 God’s omnipotence.”44 In carefully examining both halves of the vision in


God, then—as an explanation of sensory perception and of intellectual perception—the problem space of the book opens up more widely. For the will’s activity, as developed in Malebranche’s discussion of the union of the fi nite and the infi nite 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 Malebranche’s occasionalism, the doctrine of the vision in God, explains human beings’ dependence on God for both their sensory and pure intellectual perception. Often misunderstood, Malebranche’s doctrine completes his metaphysics of creaturely dependence and divine omnipotence. While one might be a partial occasionalist without explain-ing the acquisition of all knowledge as dependent upon God—for example, philosophers such as René Descartes and Antoine Arnauld who posited an active will directed toward an individual faculty of pure intellection—for Malebranche, the only occasionalism fully consistent with God’s nature governs the understanding as well.45 Serious consideration of the meaning of God qua infi nitely 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 modifi cations; that in His wisdom they fi nd 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 mind’s place, and how this shapes Malebranche’s 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 Malebranche’s claim that “the only purely intelligible substance is God’s, 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.


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 creatures—remember 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 Malebranche’s strict occasionalism. All of these are merely occasional causes. If the only purely intelligible substance is God’s, then of course we can only see bodies or ideas in His substance. There is a tighter connection between Malebranche’s occasionalism and his vision in God than is com-monly 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 mind’s 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 ideas—not bodies—can act upon the mind (since it will turn out that ideas just are God’s always effi cacious 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 modifi cations, reveal ideas to them). Malebranche defi nes idea as “the immediate object, or the object closest to the mind, when it perceives something, i.e. that which affects and modifi es 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 exist—such as dancing pink elephants or water


in the desert—it 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/classifi cation of the different ways in which this might occur. Examining these alternatives shows the positions Malebranche took as philosophical competitors. He fi rst 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 argu-ments: (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 fi ll 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 don’t they sensibly diminish in size?53 With these arguments—and his earlier discussion in book one of the errors of the senses—Malebranche 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. Malebranche’s 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


create its own ideas from material impressions, it would be performing a feat perhaps even more diffi cult than creation from nothing:

It is even more diffi cult 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 fi rst 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 diffi cult, or even more diffi cult, 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 it—for 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 fi rst place.

For similar reasons, Malebranche attacks the theory of mind as a store-house of ideas created within us. Given the fact that God always acts in the simplest manner, He would not create the mind with the infi nity of ideas needed just to know the different kinds of ellipses. He certainly would not complicate things further and create the mind with the infi nitely infi nite number of ideas needed to know the rest of geometrical fi gures 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 body’s 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


be able to determine precisely which among the infi nite 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 suffi ces for us to see the objects surrounding us.58

The soul’s 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 man-ner) 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 infi nity 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 infi nite or even general, as is what we perceive in these cases.”60 So the simplicity of God’s ways rules out the infi nite store-house model, as does our own soul’s inability to select from among such ideas, and so also does the very nature of certain ideas as greater than any created reality.

The fi nal 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 modifi ca-tions 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, infi nitely more.”61 Malebranche presses heavily here on his claim that no created being possesses the infi nite reality needed to contain the perfections of all beings—“to see nothing is not to see”—so 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


Him and He can see “within Himself all beings by considering His own perfections, which represent them to Him.”65 No merely fi nite mind could contain ideas infi nite in number and character (see later).

Further, because the world and its creatures depend on God’s 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 modifi cations 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 satisfi es 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 God’s works in Him, provided that God wills to reveal it to what in Him represents them.69

So rather than creating an infi nite number of innate ideas, or trying to claim that fi nite minds can contain infi nite 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 God’s ways.

In contrast, Malebranche believes that the vision in God conforms to reason and to the economy with which God’s laws govern the realm of nature. God’s power and wisdom “are shown by doing greater things with very simple and straightforward means,” as in God’s creation of the mate-rial world and all its creatures from extension alone.70 Because God can


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 Malebranche’s argument by elimination has taken ideas out of the Cartesian mind and transported them to God’s; 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 grandeur—his doctrine does not posit that we see God’s absolute essence in this life, but only that we see in God’s substance what is relative to crea-tures 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 infi nitely perfect being. The vision in God does not exalt human power but appears to undermine it. This doctrine satisfi es 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. God’s 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 God—the 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 mind’s 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 it—albeit 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


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 infi nite 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 clarifi es 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 modifi cations, 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 fi nite and particular being a triangle in general, while it is a contradiction that the soul should be able to have a modifi cation in general. The sensations of color that the soul ascribes to fi gures make them particular, because no modifi cation of a particular being can be general.75

The very fact that the mind perceives—though without comprehending—the infi nite 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 infi nite.

For Malebranche, however, a fi nite mind does not have enough reality to create or possess this idea as one of its modifi cations and so the fact that we see it proves that the infi nite exists outside us. In The Dialogues, Malebranche’s “spokesman” Theodore will make this point succinctly by stating that “the modifi cations of beings cannot extend beyond those beings themselves, because the modifi cations of beings are simply those same beings existing in a particular way. My mind cannot measure this idea, for it is fi nite, and the idea is infi nite.”76 The mind cannot fully comprehend the infi nite—but by examining it the mind realizes that it can never exhaust it, not because it fails to see the infi nite’s limit, but rather because “it (the mind) sees clearly that it (the infi nite) has none.”77

Further, the idea of the infi nite we see proves God’s 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 infi nitely perfect being (which is what we have of God) should be something created.”78 To see the infi nite is to believe in God as our true light, for there is no other rational and satisfactory explanation for


this phenomenon, according to Malebranche. As fi nite creatures cannot even grasp or contain the idea of infi nite extension, they certainly do not possess enough reality to contain the idea of God, The Infi nite. So if our ability to have the idea of infi nite extension proves that God exists, our ability to see the idea of an infi nitely perfect being does so all the more:

Certainly, by infi nite intelligible extension you see that God exists. For it is only He who contains what you see, because nothing fi nite can contain an infi nite reality . . . Note, however, when I think of being and not of particular beings, when I think of the infi nite and not of a particular infi nite, it is certain, in the fi rst place, that I do not see so vast a reality in the modifi cations of my mind. For if I cannot fi nd suffi cient reality in them to represent the infi nite in extension, that is all the more reason why I shall not fi nd enough there to represent the infi nite in all ways. Thus it is only God, the infi nite indeterminate being, or the infi nitely infi nite infi nite, who can contain the infi nitely infi nite reality I see when I think of being, and not of particular beings or particular infi nites.79

This idea of the infi nite even comes before and permits our conception of the fi nite. Malebranche says that we conceive of infi nite being when we fi rst think of being, for we do not yet think of it as fi nite or infi nite.

In order to for us to fi rst think of and recognize something fi nite, however, we must fi rst 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 infi nite, 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 infi nite; 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 infi nite, 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 Plato’s Meno: the conceptual problem “about the very possibility of cogni-tion in the fi rst place . . . Malebranche claims that the mind’s ability to understand and relate things to itself depends on some sort of cognitive backdrop against which particular things can be identifi ed.”81 The vision in


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 fi rst place. Only God can act on creatures. The ideas or eternal perfections that exist in His total simplicity are effi cacious on our minds, so to speak—these “effi cacious 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 made—especially human minds and hearts—He 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, fi nite 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 infi nite ideas of extension in God that this perception is possible.

On Malebranche’s account, sensory perception is made up of two elements: a pure idea and a sensation. The sensation is merely a modifi -cation 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 clarifi es in the tenth elucidation, we should not jump to the conclusion that there is a one-to-one correspondence between the


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 God’s 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 effi cacy of His substance, and particularly sensible things, through God’s applying intelligible extension to our mind to a thousand different ways, and that thus intel-ligible 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 infi nite 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 God’s reveal-ing 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 modifi cations 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 Word—God qua Divine Reason—and 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


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 God’s wisdom within us: “Reason constantly speaks to it [your mind] but, since you lack attention, you do not suffi ciently 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 mind’s judgments and the heart’s love.90 Attention is the occasional cause of our enlightenment, and our desires and love deter-mine what we will focus on and the goods we will pursue. Malebranche’s 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 infl uence upon anything causing that impact, humans do have some infl uence over the occasional cause of their enlightenment.

Malebranche fl atly 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 fi re; we err if we jump to the conclusion that heat is really a quality of the fi re. If however, we consult the idea of infi nite extension, we will see that extension—which is the essence of bodies—can only possess relations of fi gure and distance. Our decision to think about the essence of bodies is under our control in a way that our sensory experi-ence 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 God’s laws of nature, and both the material and the spiritual universe would be completely


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 free-dom, especially over the determination of our attention, and how human agency fi ts into his occasionalist metaphysics. This chapter has laid the groundwork needed to understand Malebranche’s basic ontology and the problem of freedom it generates. The next chapter analyzes in more detail how God’s wisdom (order) determines His manner of acting and the implications of this view for Malebranche’s metaphysics. Chapter 3 uses the infamous Arnauld–Malebranche debate over ideas to delve deeper into the nature and function of his doctrine of the vision in God. Chapter 4 shows how Malebranche’s development of the ontology of the divine ideas and their relationship to the human mind sharpened his conception of the human mind’s knowing powers and the will’s immanent power. Chapter 5 brings all of these discussions to bear on the mind’s power of immanent causation and his considered account of the role and scope of human moral and intellectual freedom.

Chapter 2

God, Order, and General Volitions

Having laid out Malebranche’s 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 occa-sionalism made clear, Malebranche embraces a thoroughly theocentric metaphysics. His God does not, like Descartes’, vindicate the faculty of human intellect, then fade from view. Malebranche’s 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 book—the puzzle of free human agency within such a God-centered and controlled universe—God’s own activity must fi rst be further analyzed.

According to Malebranche, “order” is the rule of God’s 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 attri-butes 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 infi nitely 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 God’s wisdom or Reason is consubstantial with Him, God fi nds all truths and perfections within Himself. As will be discussed in this chapter, the apparently paradoxical notion of God constraining or limit-ing Himself—of submitting His power to His wisdom—is essential to understanding the order that governs both the divine and human intel-lects. 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 Malebranche’s theodicy: his explanation and justifi cation of sin, error, and evil in the world.

God, Order, and General Volitions 25

I. God and Order

God, the infi nitely 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 restric-tions, His perfections contain no limitations. Each of His perfections does not confl ict 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 infi nite, it is all the divine Being.”3 God’s attribute of justice, for example, does not prevent Him from possessing the attribute of wisdom, in the way that matter’s possessing the attribute of triangularity rules out its possessing the attribute of squareness. Unlike fi nite 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 infi nity of their relations (actual and possible). Malebranche categorizes the kinds of relation we can see in God’s wisdom into relations of magnitude (specula-tive 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 con-fusedly. Unlike quantitative relations, these relations incite us not only to judgment but also “excite movement”: the relation of inequality in perfec-tion 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 fi nd therein the same rela-tions of magnitude or the same speculative truths. They also discover therein the same practical truths, the same laws, the same order, when


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 sees—but we can see the same objects that He does (even if we do not see them fully).

Malebranche does not think that the fi nite mind could fully comprehend the “abyss” of infi nite relations among the infi nite 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 infi nitely 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 infi nitely 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 justifi ed in making these kinds of speculation because we are—in the vision in God—actually in contact with the very substance of God. Malebranche fi rmly 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 neces-sary 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 indis-pensable obligation to explain and defend it as much as I possibly can.9

While commentators have duly noted Malebranche’s break with Descartes in removing ideas from the human to the divine mind, however, less empha-sis has been placed on Malebranche’s further break from Descartes in mak-ing Reason consubstantial with God—thus 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


“make” them. They make up the Reason that is consubstantial with God: these truths are God’s eternal wisdom. So Malebranche fi rmly 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 oromission, 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’ vindica-tion of reason by proving the existence of an all perfect, all good God does the trick. Perhaps he shared Arnauld’s famous worry that Descartes rea-soned 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 under-mined 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 fi nal 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


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 con-ceive 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 effects—God could immutably will changing effects.14 God could immutably will, for example, that 2 + 2 = 4 for the fi rst 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 doesn’t 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 indif-ferent, 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 God’s will and the truths themselves would be arbitrary. As Malebranche sees it, bas-ing truth on God’s power turns God into a dictator and truth into a sham. Such an account does not do justice to the concept of an infi nitely 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 modifi ca-tions of the mind, is to establish Pyrrhonism and to make room for the


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 God’s wisdom can we be sure of them. And those truths are eternal and necessary in the fi rst place precisely because God fi nds them in His Reason and does not create them. Finally, because He is an infi nitely perfect being, God can only act in ways that honor Him—by 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 order”17; this is the only rational explana-tion, and the only explanation compatible with God’s 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 perfec-tion or order that govern God’s 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 God’s 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 Malebranche’s implicit premise that an infi nitely 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 fi rst also appear to be merely speculative truths, which do not move the will, become a law binding God. For an infi nitely perfect being necessarily loves Himself and necessarily acts in ways that honor His own perfections.


“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 infi nite degrees of perfection.”20 As will be explained in the last two chapters, minds that exercise their freedom and are accord-ingly 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, God’s 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 infi nitely 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 fulfi lls or honors God’s power:

For it seems evident to me that the infi nitely perfect Being loves Himself infi nitely, 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

Malebranche’s reasoning here depends on the implicit premise that an infi nitely perfect being is totally self-suffi cient. We might reconstruct his argument as follows: (1) God is the infi nitely perfect being; (2) an infi nitely perfect being is perfectly self-suffi cient; (3) so God relies on no external motives for His action; (4) God’s only motive or end comes from Himself; thus (5) God loves or moves toward Himself alone—that 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 God’s infi nite power means that whatever He wills happens; His infi nite wisdom determines what ways of acting will


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 necessar-ily loves according to the hierarchy of those perfections. Now the hierarchy of relations of perfections or attributes in God is order: God’s 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 God’s creation of the world. For as God is self-suffi cient, it is hard to see why or how He could be moved to create anything outside Himself. Indeed, since the gap between the fi nite and the infi nite is infi nite, 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] infi nitely and, principally because of the divinity He communicates to it, He receives from it that fi rst glory whichis 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 Him—God 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 God’s action in creation.29

Suppose Malebranche is right: even the creation of the world comes about only because of God’s necessary love for Himself, through His desire to honor His perfections. Malebranche must still justify his specifi c inter-pretation of what kinds of actions honor God’s attributes. Malebranche claims, for instance, that God only acts via general volitions. But why should this follow from God’s aiming to honor His perfections? Malebranche, like Leibniz, assumes that the principle of suffi cient reason demands that there


be—at least in principle—a rational explanation for everything that occurs in the universe, even for God’s actions. Thus they both developed theodi-cies justifying and explaining the apparent evil consequences of God’s actions. Analysis of the concept of God qua infi nitely perfect being satisfi es this demand in general by explaining that the rule of God’s 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 order’s requirements.

Malebranche builds upon this fundamental analysis of the order that is God’s 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 specifi c claims concerning God’s governing creation. This kind of extension outward from God’s 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 Malebranche’s metaphysics back to God. The ramifi cations of this for his explanation of human freedom will become evident in successive chapters. First, however, it will be useful to examine God’s 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 infi nitely perfect being and (2) order as the essential limit that God places upon himself. The rule of God’s 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 infi nite treasures of His wisdom an infi nity of possible worlds . . . determines Himself to create that world which could have been produced and pre-served 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 God’s law determines that God proportions His action to His work,


thus: (1) He acts via simple rather than complex means; (2) He acts for an end; and (3) He makes no useless efforts. An infi nitely perfect being is by defi nition self-suffi cient, 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 1688’s 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 ulti-mate 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 Leibniz’s, Malebranche asserts that God could, in theory, make a world more perfect that the one in which we live—a 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 infi nitely wise being to act.”33 A world with too many laws apparently would fail to honor God’s 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 God’s action in the world—that is, the laws of nature—is 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 God’s intention in willing: God aims, so to speak, at general laws of nature and their place in the over-all design of the world He wants to create rather than at any particular


event per se. God’s 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 estab-lished 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 God’s simplicity and immutability. And the fruitfulness of achieving many effects via these few simple laws bears witness to God’s wisdom and foreknowledge.

Order mandates simple rather than complex ways; only these honor God. This constant, lawful governance of creation—which we can observe in the natural world around us, in the regularity of motion of bodies, for example—also follows from an analysis of God qua infi nitely perfect and the order that governs His conduct. For wisdom is also one of God’s 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


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 God’s attributes. Considerations of wisdom and goodness, in concert with those of simplicity and immutabil-ity, 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 God’s 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 “there-fore 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 fi eld, 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


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 conse-quence 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 God’s 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 par-ticular 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 plan—instead of as “necessary consequences of the general laws which He has established in order to produce the best effects”45—He 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 God’s part. Worse, if God gave sinners grace, knowing that (as sometimes happens) it would fail and make


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 fi elds 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 God’s operation in the created realm.

III. Analysis of God’s 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 God’s volitions individuated? We might interpret God qua true cause acting through general wills as either: (1) God wills the general laws governing the


realms of nature once and for all, setting up reciprocal modalities between mind and body, mind and divine Reason, and Christ’s 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 corre-spondences between occasional causes and their effects. In a discussion of these competing interpretations, Steven Nadler argues that the former view of Malebranche’s general will—purportedly held by Arnauld, Nicholas Jolley, and Desmond Clarke, among others—is 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 God’s acting by general wills rules out God’s willing at time t on occasion a to move my arm because I so will. Nadler contends that such an interpretation vitiates God’s causal power, as Malebranche would have understood it, by making Him causally responsi-ble only for general, universal decrees and not for particular events.51

Nadler argues that the more traditional reading of Malebranche’s God as always present and active in the universe is the proper one, provided we understand what Malebranche means by God’s “general volitions.” Accord-ing to Nadler, Malebranche’s 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.” God’s 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 God’s acting by “general volitions” rules out His being the causal force in each individual case:

Malebranche’s God is directly and immediately responsible for each and every particular effect in nature; that is, that God’s activity as effi cient cause is constant, ubiquitous, and necessary. At the very moment when one billiard ball strikes another, God wills effi caciously then and there to move the second ball. The second ball’s motion is not the immediate


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 Malebranche’s commitment to God’s continuous cre-ation 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 defi nes “particular volitions” as volitions that are arbitrary or not in accordance with divine laws (such as in the case of miracles).54

Malebranche’s own attempts to elucidate the concept of general willings appear to support Nadler’s 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 effi cacy of His will is not determined at all by some general law to produce some effect.”55 Indeed, Malebranche reiterates that God—the one true cause—does 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 infi nite 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-specifi c or only capable of deter-mining general events. Perhaps Nadler is right: general volitions include a particular temporalized content for every natural event.

Desmond Clarke, however, fi nds Nadler’s talk of temporalized volitions and God’s 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 God’s part which bears little comparison with the repeated interventions of the assiduous watchmaker.”57 Clarke argues that we could only reconcile Malebranche’s occasionalism with Nadler’s account of divine general voli-tions by making “a numerical distinction between God’s various causal actions.” But, says Clarke, multiplying distinct and temporally indexed actions in God is incoherent.58


Clarke objects to attributing to God the potentially infi nite number of volitional acts needed to account for each change in nature. He also rejects Nadler’s picture of God acting at the same time as the events He causes: “Thus, not only do God’s 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 God’s simplicity, and God’s acting “in time” is fl at out incoherent. Clarke wonders why God “must constantly” will that some-thing exists rather than simply willing that it “exist constantly,” hinting at his own preference for God’s 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 object’s ultimate demise.

Clarke supports his reading of Malebranchean “general volitions” as some kind of single, all-encompassing, eternal volition by pressing the watch-maker 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 fi rst made.”62 According to Clarke, God’s involvement in the natural world resembles that of the smart watch-maker: 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 God’s action if God does indeed possess particular volitions loads Clarke’s interpretation. His lan-guage implies an interpretation that needs defending. Why must God’s being the causal force in each and every case—in accord with the general laws of nature—count 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


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. Malebranche’s distaste for such ad hoc interventions in nature emerges in the evolution of his account of miracles. Whereas in 1684’s Treatise on Nature and Grace Malebranche explained miracles precisely as such particu-lar exceptions to the laws of nature, by 1688’s 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 infi nitely perfect being, Malebranche seems determined—even in cases that appear to us to violate laws—to 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 God’s volitions and the causal events that they bring about problematic. Yet this need not push us into Clarke (and Arnauld, and Jolley’s) pseudo-Leibnizean reading of Malebranche. Malebranche himself argues that reconciling God’s unity and the multiplic-ity of His perfections is a puzzle beyond human solution66—reconciling


divine simplicity and a multiplicity of discrete volitions or God’s 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 infi nite in every sense . . . and since anything that is infi nite in every sense is incomprehensible in every respect to the human mind.”67

The fi nite mind cannot hope to comprehend the infi nite. And while such a lack of explanation might weaken Malebranche’s 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. God’s 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 infi nite and produce thousands and thousands of changes in the universe, these decrees are always the same. This is because the effi cacy 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 danger-ous prejudice of a “nature” and effi cacy distinguished from God’s 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.

Malebranche’s insistence that we beware the prejudice of believing in any effi cacy distinct from God undercuts interpretations of Malebranche’s 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 unequivo-cally rejects placing causal power in the natural world or created “natures,” however. As Nadler succinctly summarizes, this rejecting of creaturely power is precisely why God’s general volitions cannot be reduced to the God of Leibnizean pre-established harmony:

Leibniz’s god creates and sustains a world of causally active (but not inter-active) beings, beings characterized by productive natures. Events and states of affairs in the world have as their proximate causes the natures of


or principles in things. Malebranche’s God, on the other hand, creates and sustains a world devoid of natures and powers, a world of inactive, causally inert fi nite beings.69

Nadler’s warning not to misinterpret Malebranche’s 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:

God’s general laws are effi cacious by their very nature . . . It is true, it seems, that in addition to willing the laws, God must will the initial condi-tions; 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 can-didates for agency, however. Further, as we have seen, in Malebranche’s universe God is the sole causal agent. Jolley mistakes Malebranche’s talk of the laws of nature as the effi cacious volitions of the creator for an assertion that the laws somehow gain true effi caciousness 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 effi cacy of the will of God, who conserves it successively in different places.”72

Effi cacious 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 fi rmly thinks that He is), there must be a volition corresponding to each temporal, particular event. Otherwise, some states of affairs would occur independently of God’s direct causal action. Yet God’s constant creation of the world rules out anything in the world existing for which He is not directly causally responsible.


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 God’s 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 confl ict between God’s immutability and His willing each event in the world resulted from our fi nite intellect’s inability to grasp the attributes or ways of being of God—for these “ways of being are forever infi nite in every sense, forever divine, and consequently forever incomprehensible.”76 The rule by which we must judge God’s 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 infi nitely 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 infi nite, 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 infi nite—yet still unitary—conjunction.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,


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 God’s 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 infi nite surpasses us.”83 To deny that God is causally responsible for each and every particular event in the world, however, would diminish God’s 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 pre-established harmony, are at odds with Malebranche’s offi cial position. Only our limited conception of the infi nite 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 God’s 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 (1612–94), a fellow priest and devoted Cartesian, changed from an early friend to a committed opponent of Malebranche’s philoso-phy. Although initially impressed by Malebranche’s The Search after Truth, Arnauld reacted with horror to the doctrines contained within his friend’s work Treatise on Nature and Grace (1680).1 Specifi cally, Arnauld detested Malebranche’s 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 Malebranche’s earlier work. As Arnauld reads him, Malebranche’s 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 Malebranche’s metaphysics. As Arnauld describes his strategy:

In the meantime, it [Ideas] will be useful, if I am not mistaken, to dimin-ish the infl ated opinion which many have of the reliability of our friend’s 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 Arnauld’s opening salvo, the philosophical and personal battle continued, through books, letters, and journal articles, until their respec-tive deaths. Although their debate grew acerbic and rhetorical as the years progressed, Arnauld’s 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 other’s 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 under-standing. This devotion to activity confl icted with Arnauld’s 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 creation’s 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 intellectual–spiritual 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, Malebranche’s emphasis on the power of the human will to determine its focus in the quest for intellectual–spiritual salvation would draw protest from Arnauld, the purported champion of the human soul’s thorough-going activity. It is important to recall that Arnauld goes back to attack The Search after Truth, and the human understanding’s 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 Malebranche’s 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. Kremer’s assessment that Arnauld’s On True and False Ideas strives to offer a traditional “logic” or guide to the mind’s epistemic limits and the nature of ideas in order “to forearm his readers against the mistake which he says lies at the origin of Malebranche’s theodicy, the mistake of transgressing the limits of human knowledge of God.”7

In other words, Arnauld believes that because Malebranche fi rst went astray about the nature of ideas, he subsequently errs about the knowledge gleaned from our idea of God, and thus gives a fl awed account of the nature of the human mind’s relation to God. It is worth noting that in contrast with Arnauld’s schizophrenic commitment to full human intellectual activity and total human spiritual passivity, Malebranche’s thorough-going philo-sophical and theological commitment to divine omnipotence with limited human agency built in appears more consistent.

Indeed, this ambiguity in Arnauld’s 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


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, Malebranche’s conception of the limited, fi nite human intellect vis-à-vis the infi nite 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 fi nite human intellect is too limited to contain ideas infi nite 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 fi ghting over direct or indirect sensory perception; rather, they are fi ghting over the proper way to characterize the human soul and its relation to God.8

I. Arnauld’s Attack on the Vision in God

Arnauld wants to make ideas a property of the human mind, not some-thing removed from us that God must deign to reveal. In contrast to Malebranche’s doctrine of the vision in God—with its “ideas as represen-tations distinct from perceptions”—Arnauld 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 consid-ered. 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 mind’s inclinations active but its understanding passive, is one that could also be posed of Descartes.10 Granted, Descartes made ideas modifi cations of the human, not the divine, intellect. But Descartes also made the understand-ing 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


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 geometri-cally” the falsity of Malebranche’s “representative beings” and proceeds to do so by offering several defi nitions attesting to the soul’s active nature and ideas as its perceptions/modifi cations.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 defi nitions.

In defi nition two, for example, he baldly states that “To think, to know, to perceive, are the same thing.”14 Defi nition three stipulates that ideas are modifi cations of mind, and defi nition six points out that our having an idea in our mind is the same thing as our having a perception—two 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 modifi cations or as its ideas. This conception of ideas as modifi cations of our minds naturally grows out of Arnauld’s 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 modifi cations 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 modifi cation 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 modifi es, the other to the thing per-ceived insofar as it is objectively in the soul; and that the word perception indicates more directly the fi rst 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


This notion of objective presence is central to Arnauld’s explanation ofthe active mind’s power of knowing, versus Malebranche’s passive under-standing receiving ideas.

Arnauld takes himself to be merely elaborating on Descartes’ well-known distinction between ideas qua mental modifi cations and ideas qua repre-sentative entities. As Descartes describes this distinction in the Third Meditation:

Insofar as ideas are considered simply modes of thought, there is no rec-ognizable 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 some-thing 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 equal—they have the same “formal” reality, they are equally real. One modifi cation of mind is not “more” of a modifi -cation than another. However, we may consider and compare the repre-sentative 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 infi nite objective reality, whereas the idea that represents a square shape has a slight objective reality, for the fi rst represents and infi nite substance and the second a mere fi nite mode.18

In defi nition 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 Malebranche’s representative ideas distinct from perception are superfl uous.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 Malebranche’s “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.


Objective being is so essential to Arnauld’s conception of the intellect that he states in his eighth defi nition that “this way of being objectively in the mind, is so peculiar to mind and to thought, being what in particular consti-tutes 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 represent-ing 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/idea—although only one modifi cation or act of the soul—is best described as a perception of the soul it modifi es 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 Arnauld’s explanation of the representative power of the mind’s perceptual acts has caused his commentators much trouble. As Daisie Radner succinctly describes the problem, Arnauld’s 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/perception’s representational power. However, I believe that it is a mistake to try and explain Arnauld’s objective reality further: it defi nes 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 object—that 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 object—or


what causes us to have this particular objective existence in cognition—we cannot seek to defi ne further the objective relation itself that allows our perception to represent objects in the fi rst place. Arnauld explains the rep-resentative 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 men-tal object in our mind. Granted, Arnauld’s 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, Arnauld’s 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 mind’s own cognition makes the object be present or exhib-ited 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 sun’s being—this implies, Kremer says, that the object does not exhibit itself to the mind and supports his reading of cogni-tion as totally immanent for Arnauld. What interests me more, however, about Kremer’s account is the suggestion I fi nd 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 “Arnauld’s admi-ration for Descartes obscures the otherwise lucid presentation of an act theory of ideas,”28 Kremer’s account makes Arnauld’s Cartesian explana-tion of objective reality central to understanding his theory of ideas. It is


precisely because of the existence of the things we conceive as objective presences, so to speak, that we can know them through the explicit self-consciousness that accompanies all refl ection. 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 refl ection 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 self-consciousness 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 intro-spection 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 Malebranche’s 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 mind’s 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 specifi es how cognition is supposed to be immanent [takes place entirely in the knower]. This view of how cognition is imma-nent is the core of his philosophical notion of an idea.”32 I would shift the


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 knower’s own mind. This view of how cognition is imma-nent and active is the core of Arnauld’s philosophical notion of an idea.

The moral of the story on Arnauld and objective presence, then, is that the soul’s immanent activity shapes Arnauld’s conception of the nature of ideas. Because the mind is wholly active, its consideration of—and some-times even the causation of—its perceptual modifi cations must be active. Arnauld considers viewing ideas qua mental modifi cations 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 one—but 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-à-vis its own perceptual modifi -cations; but here again, we must keep in mind that he was fi ghting what he believed to be the unacceptable passivity of the Malebranchean intellect.

Arnauld’s 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 enlight-enment 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 effi cient cause, causes my perceptions of material things, but whether or not the perceptions that I have of them are imma-nent, available to me because they are in me objectively or intelligibly,


because it is my nature to perceive and to think. These kinds of claim ground his attack on Malebranche’s vision in God.

II. Malebranche’s Response to Arnauld’s Challenge

In his 1684 Response of the Author of the Search After Truth Mr. Arnauld’s book On True and False Ideas, Malebranche gives a systematic, point-by-point response to Arnauld’s attack on the vision in God. Since this chapter aims to contrast Arnauld’s conception of the mind with Malebranche’s, I will focus on Malebranche’s general counterattack on Arnauld’s “representa-tive modalities” of mind. We must fi rst consider Arnauld’s 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 differ-ent 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 distance—he 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 defi nition, material and extended, and the soul is spiritual, mediation via immaterial ideas is neces-sary 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


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 God’s 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 fi nite, created beings are both limited and powerless to act. Only God is infi nite, 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 Malebranche’s 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 modifi cation 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 Malebranche’s discussion of the soul’s fi nite modalities and their relation to general and infi nite 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 Malebranche’s 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 sub-stance of universal Reason can penetrate minds and enlighten them by His presence. I claim that one cannot without Him, nor outside of Him fi nd the truth, for which minds are made; like one cannot fi nd 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


God, the infi nitely 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, deter-mine that only God has causal power—thus 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 it—nothing but God alone; for only the Author of our being can change its modifi cations . . . the effi cacious 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, isn’t 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 isn’t in the woman, it is a modifi cation 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 Arnauld’s “objective realities” as representative mental objects (as Malebranche does) or as acts structuring the mind to the world (as Nadler recently has done),45 Malebranche’s 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 percep-tual contact with the world—if the im/mediate perception distinction holds—then skeptical doubts about whether we have successfully bridged


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 Malebranche’s 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 Arnauld’s perception/ideas are not up to the job. More specifi cally, the human mind and its modifi cations possess neither the power nor the reality needed for even mere sensory perception.

This focus on the limited human mind versus the unlimited, infi nite 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 Arnauld’s “essentially representative modalities” of mind because he rejects the conception of the soul as capable of having infi nite or general modifi cations, the claim that the fi nite could represent the infi nite. 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 soul’s own modifi cations 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 infi nite ones—and not merely in temporal succession, but it even perceives (without comprehending) the


infi nite. But the mind is “neither actually infi nite nor capable of infi nite modifi cations simultaneously, [so] it is absolutely impossible for the mind to see in itself what is not there.”49 Malebranche is starting—as Arnauld continually admonishes him to do—from an introspectively discovered fact about his mind: that he perceives the infi nite. From this fact he argues that the essential pre-conditions for this fact must be either that (1) I am actually infi nite (which is false), or that (2) I possess infi nite simultaneous modifi cations (also false because of my fi nite nature), or that (3) I see the infi nite idea in an actually infi nite being. Point (3) is the only non-absurd answer. A modifi cation is just a way of being of a substance, according to Malebranche; and a fi nite being cannot have an infi nite modifi cation. Likewise, a particular being cannot have a general modifi cation; so the general idea of a circle or triangle cannot be a modifi cation of the soul either.

The particular, fi nite soul cannot see the general or the infi nite in itself—cannot see what is not there. Daisie Radner explains Malebranche’s reasoning as follows:

Malebranche proves that nothing fi nite can represent the infi nite 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 infi nite in anything that is fi nite, for then we would perceive an infi nite which was not there. Since the infi nite is not in any way contained in the fi nite, it is not perceivable in the fi nite, and hence the fi nite cannot represent it.50

Recall that for Arnauld it is on account of the mind’s containing or exhibit-ing the objective reality of objects that his act/ideas can represent external objects. In response, Malebranche denies that fi nite modifi cations can contain or exhibit certain kinds of objects. For the fi nite to represent the infi nite it would have to contain it, or, as Radner points up, we would perceive something that was not there—and, for Malebranche, to see nothing is not to see.


Indeed, as Malebranche sees it, Arnauld has reversed things: for it is the infi nite that contains the fi nite, thus allowing us to see fi nite objects:

But not only does the mind have the idea of the infi nite, it even has it before that of the fi nite. For we conceive of infi nite beings simply because we conceive of being, without thinking whether it is fi nite or infi nite. In order for us to conceive of a fi nite being, something must necessarily be eliminated from this general notion of being, which consequently must come fi rst. Thus, the mind perceives nothing except in the idea it has of the infi nite, 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 infi nite; 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 experi-ences of particular triangles. Malebranche is arguing that the idea of the infi nite is logically prior to that of the fi nite—we grasp the fi nite by realiz-ing it falls short of the infi nite. It is because the infi nite contains the fi nite that we can fi nd 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 fi nite 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 modi-fi cation 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/idea—the objective reality that is a modifi cation of my being—that I discover “truths” about the object my perceptual modalities purportedly represent. But all my modali-ties 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


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 infi nite, 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. Arnauld’s 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 Arnauld’s misconcep-tion 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 modifi cations 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 fi nite and the infi nite, 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


Arnauld admits, recall, that some ideas—such as that of God—may have been implanted in him by God; so the origin of the idea comes from God’s power. Yet Arnauld claims that we do possess the idea of God, that we have an Arnauldian perception–idea 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 God’s 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 infi nite is innate, he makes this idea a modifi cation 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 infi nite, of all beings. Careful introspection reveals that we possess knowl-edge greater than can be contained in our limited minds. Malebranche opposes Arnauld’s focus on a fully active mind with a focus on the limitations of our fi nite mind. He also points out, with justifi cation, that the “defi nitions” Arnauld uses to “demonstrate” his claim about the nature of ideas already include the essential claims that our ideas just are our per-ceptions 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 ulti-mately on ideas in God’s or our own minds: Arnauld thus cannot simply presuppose his preferred answers in his defi nitions.

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 glorifi es 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 modifi cation 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 none-theless, as a geometer, he gives a certain geometrical fl ourish, with which I doubt other geometers would be satisfi ed.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


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 defi nitions that beg the question.

On Malebranche’s 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 infi nity” (i.e., like we can discover an infi nity of fi gures 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 sentiment—by feeling or by sensation—I am inti-mately 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 fi gures 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 Arnauld’s: 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 soul’s existence in a way that we cannot be sure of the body’s. However, the clear and distinct idea of extension affords us knowledge of body’s 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


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 fi nite that they cannot represent the general and the infi nite, but also that our ignorance of their nature renders them unsuitable to represent the clear and distinct. According to Malebranche, such claims push Arnauld’s 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 intelli-gible. And Mr. Arnauld, who calls himself a disciple of this great saint, wants to fi nd in the modalities of the soul which are only shadows and confused feeling, the representative of the infi nitely 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 fi nd the infi nite and the gen-eral in his fi nite, particular modalities; when he claims to fi nd there the infi nitely infi nite—God—Malebranche says that Arnauld offends both rea-son and religion.

And since ideas from a circle in general to infi nite extension to God Him-self cannot “belong” to the soul, so to speak, we could never fi nd them inside of ourselves or form ideas of them based on information we do pos-sess, because we would not know what we were looking for. This problem of having to know what you seek before you can fi nd it is as old as Plato’s Meno. Malebranche thinks that his account is superior to Arnauld’s 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, doesn’t touch mine at all. It suffi ces to know something confusedly, in consequence of the laws that unite the mind with Reason. But it does not suffi ce 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


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 Malebranche’s account, of course, we are joined to the divine infi nite 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 horrifi ed 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 pur-ported God-given ability to give ourselves perceptual modifi cations 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 infi nite, 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


“participate” in divine Reason and how do they occasion or bring about his union? These are the problems of the next chapter, which examines Malebranche’s 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 percep-tion. 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 Malebranche’s 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 fi nd an idea of force, effi cacy, of power, save in the will of the infi nitely 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 knowl-edge.1 Correct use of the intellect leading to freedom from the passions and to certain knowledge fi gures 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 one’s 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 mind’s faculties arguably lay at the basis of the Cartesian program in particular. This importance can be seen in Arnauld and Nicole’s infl uential Port-Royal Logic, which aimed at training its readers in the proper use of the intellect.3

Few would question Nicolas Malebranche’s inclusion in the rationalist tradition.4 For while Malebranche famously takes ideas out of the Cartesian mind and transports them to God’s—thus privileging the divine over the natural light—he shares Descartes’ belief that our intellect, not our senses, holds the key to metaphysical truths such as the essence of matter, the mind–body distinction, and the existence of God.5 Yet, recently, Nicholas Jolley has contended that Malebranche’s later commitment to “effi cacious


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. Jolley’s position builds upon Alquié and Robinet’s claims that around 1694–95 Malebranche moved from a vision “in” God to a vision “by” God. Now God’s 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

Alquié and Robinet argue that Malebranche, pushed by the battles with Arnauld and Régis over the status of ideas, introduced the language of “effi cacious” 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 idea–objects in God to an active “illumina-tionist” view whereby divine ideas cause (intellectual and sensory) percep-tion by modifying the soul.8 Once one accepts this view of the place and function of effi cacious ideas in Malebranche’s metaphysics, it seems natural to accept Jolley’s 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 ulti-mately made the soul passive in all its states, including its volitional ones.10

In this chapter, I argue that a strong interpretation of effi cacious ideas, whereby they appear to become true causal agents, must be rejected precisely because it pushes us into an incorrect reading of Malebranche’s 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 nullifi es the role of the human faculties. Making ideas qua ideas caus-ally active violates both the strictures of Malebranche’s occasionalist metaphysics and his substance–mode ontology. Additionally, denying Malebranche’s commitment to the soul’s cognitive and volitional capaci-ties makes it impossible to understand the belief in human intellectual and moral agency that motivated much of Malebranche’s work. Indeed, denying Malebranche’s commitment to the real use of the intellect effec-tively 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 specifi c conception of our will’s “attention” or ability to desire and thereby occasion further knowledge renders causally effi cacious ideas superfl uous.

I begin by arguing that confusion about the ontology of divine ideas allows a strong reading of them as “effi cacious” agents, rendering the

The Union of the Divine and the Human Minds 69

human intellect and will irrelevant to the union with divine Reason. Next, I discuss other critics’ grounds for attributing a strong doctrine of effi cacious ideas to Malebranche and analyze some of their and Jolley’s evidence for this position. I argue that careful analysis of God qua effi cacious 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 rela-tion to the human mind. Finally, I develop a picture of the Malebranchean mind in which God establishes human attention, not effi cacious ideas, as the bridge between the human and the divine mind. This view preserves Malebranche’s 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 refl ect. 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 Malebranche’s Christian rationalism, “the mind’s atten-tion 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 God’s ideas must be answered: for mistakes about the “place” of God’s ideas engender errors about their function in human sensory and intellec-tual 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 modifi ed.14 Modes, in describing ways


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 infi nite being, unlike other substances, does not possess modifi cations. 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 infi nity of perfections, not made up of substances.16 God, the being without restriction, cannot be limited either by being modifi ed or by being made up of a collection of substances.17 As Malebranche explains this point in his fi nal work, On Physical Premotion (1715): “In the infi nite, in the true Being, there is no nothingness, no limitation, and by consequence no modifi cation. 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 contradic-tion, 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 Malebranche’s 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 entities—and consequently “solves” the problem of their ontological status (although the latter concern does not fi gure 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 effi cacious divine ideas to fi ll 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 Jolley’s account, Malebranche explains the union between the human intellect and God’s Reason needed in both intellectual and sensory percep-tion in terms of effi cacious divine ideas acting upon our minds. God’s 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 effi cacious. As Jolley describes it,


“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 intellect’s immediate objects. However, Jolley claims that, starting with the Dialogues, Malebranche makes acting on the mind a necessary and suffi cient condition for some-thing’s being the mind’s immediate object.23 Jolley extends his claim to say that Malebranche’s ultimate view is that all mental states, including both sensations and intellectual perceptions, result from effi cacious 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 Malebranche’s commitment to a substance–mode ontology, this view under-mines his Occasionalist theory of causation whereby only God Himself is a true cause. Surely only a catastrophic fl aw 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. Effi cacious Ideas: Motivations and Problems

As mentioned briefl y earlier, Arnauld and Régis challenged Malebranche to explain how our alleged union with God worked: what happens in the soul when it perceives pure ideas in God? Alquié 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 affi rmation that we are affected and thus modifi ed 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 “meta-physically” 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


as actively modifying the soul in both intellectual and sensory perception.28 Malebranche’s changed viewpoint is evident, according to Robinet, in his new vocabulary: “the terminology that concerns the possibility of the recep-tion of the idea by the soul becomes dynamic.”29 Friends of effi cacious ideas focus on the kinds of examples to which we now turn.

Jolley emphasizes passages such as the one in the Dialogues where Malebranche’s mouthpiece Theodore says that the idea of a hand, by affecting us in different ways, acts on and modifi es our soul with various sensations.30 Jolley fails to note, however, that in the very same passage Malebranche corrects this statement to refl ect 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 effi cacy and which touches and modifi es 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 modifi es our minds.

Jolley is correct to emphasize that Malebranche does not hold that ideas are either God’s whole substance, or themselves substances; and they are not modes. Instead, they are something different from God’s whole substance, from substances, and from modes; they are God’s 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, “effi cacious 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 God’s essence with which He affects us. The fi rst is merely shorthand for the second.33 The fact that our fi nite 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 God’s essence that our intellect can grasp results from our own inadequate conceptual capacity, not from the existence of distinct conceptual “entities” in God.

Further, Jolley’s 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 naïve interlocutor) and his readers away from dependence on the senses for knowledge. Just as Descartes’ Meditations


were designed to serve as what Hatfi eld has called “cognitive exercises,”35 Malebranche’s 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. Alquié also admits that Malebranche’s failure to distinguish clearly between effi cacious ideas and God acting through His ideas adds to the interpretive muddle.37 Yet Alquié clarifi es 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 us—the ideas themselves do not do so. As Alquié 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 Malebranche’s 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 Malebranche’s basic position remained the same39: only God enlightens minds by revealing and apply-ing His substance to human intellects. As Malebranche succinctly states in On Physical Premotion (1715): “I recognize no other nature that the effi cacious wills of God and I am persuaded that God alone acts immedi-ately in our soul.”40

Readers must attend carefully to Malebranche’s full explanations. Consider an example Robinet discusses from Dialogues between a Christian and a Chinese Philosopher. Malebranche fi rst 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 sensa-tion 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


However, Robinet cites only fragments from this passage, glossing it as follows (Malebranche’s 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 meaning—taken 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 minds—the divine substance is effi cacious. As Malebranche expounds in his last published work, “it is he [God] alone who by the effi cacy [effi cace] 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 sequences—they do not possess a will, they do not individually possess an intellect, although in their totality they are identifi ed 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, accord-ing to what speed, when will it decide to move? Thus give it also intelli-gence, 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 will—in a word, we would have to make God out of an idea.

Instead, because God is all-powerful, His will is necessarily effi cacious. This necessary link between willing something and its coming to pass defi nes 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 neces-sary connection, this is how I understand it; now it is only between the will


of the infi nitely 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 fi nd an idea of force, effi cacy, of power, save in the will of the infi nitely perfect Being.”46

Unfortunately, as with all things infi nite and divine, the precise details of how God operates escapes our fi nite intellect. In his fi nal work, On Physical Premotion, Malebranche argues that although we believe in God’s omnipo-tence by faith, and are persuaded in it by reason, its “mechanism of operation” outstrips our fi nite 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 “effi cacious all powerfulness of the Creator’s wills.”47 So how could ideas—neither substances capable of willing, nor God’s volitions—be 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 Malebranche’s later philosophy develops the doctrine of ideas as “vehicles for divine causation,” but misleading when he concludes from this that the “idea produces a cer-tain sort of perceptual effect.”48 Similarly, careful attention to Malebranche’s views on causation would suggest that Steven Nadler is even nearer the mark and is glossing the language of “causally effi cacious ideas” to be a way of fl eshing out the characterization of God’s action upon human minds (in response to attacks by Regis): “the ideas ‘which are located in the effi cacious substance of the Divinity’ affect and enlighten us through God’s power.”49

Nadler’s own intriguing thesis turns Malebranche into a direct realist, for whom material bodies are directly perceived—“whatever 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 con-ceptualization needed to turn a mere animal “seeing” into a human “seeing that.” While I believe Nadler’s thesis is textually underdetermined,51 the important point for interpreting the status of ideas is that Nadler’s view offers yet another way of interpreting Malebranchean ideas that does not require breaking from either his occasionalism or his substance–mode


ontology.52 Ideas read as logical constructs or concepts are not themselves causally effi cacious; 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 concepts—abstract, logical items to which the mind is related in thinking”53—“if ideas are ‘third realm’ entities, it is hard to see how they can have causal properties of any sort.”54

In sum, ideas—interpreted either as abstract logical items or as partially revealed aspects of the divine substance—do 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 fi nite 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 interven-tion of any creature,” the divine ideas are neither metaphysically distant, nor is God—whose will alone is effi cacious—unable to act upon our minds to reveal Himself to us.56

Aside from Malebranche’s loose usage, part of the interpretive confusion here stems from investing descriptive categories with meta-physical import. Consider Gueroult’s assessment that “the attribution of effi caciousness 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 agent—God—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 mind’s 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 itself—for ideas are not “parts” of God that could possess independent qualities such as passivity. And even if such a move were legiti-mate, 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 crea-tures, but without limitation and without impotence. Such is the property of being infi nite, incomprehensible to all fi nite minds.”58


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 Malebranche’s reaction to another critique of his imprecise usage. In The Search after Truth Malebranche appears to state that the soul itself attaches color to fi gures, 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 refl ect that he attributes to an author, whom he calls his friend, the most ridiculous and stupid thought that could enter a man’s mind.”60 It is ridiculous to attribute to our soul the power of attaching color to the idea of extension, despite Malebranche’s 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 doesn’t 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 God’s true and effi cacious causal action.62 God set up the general laws governing the union between soul and body—and God, by modifying the soul with color, renders particular a portion of the intelligi-ble 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 fi ll in the necessary occasionalist framework.

Jolley, however, appears to believe that making ideas a third kind of entity, outside the realm of substance and modifi cation, 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 effi cacious 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 fi rst place, Malebranche’s 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 God—neither angels nor bodies, for example—can act on human minds.64


Contra Jolley, Malebranche’s point is that nothing besides God can act on human minds. This just is his occasionalism. So ideas cannot, strictly speaking, be effi cacious. So Jolley cannot use causally effi cacious 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 fi rst place.

Finally, a strong theory of effi cacious ideas reinforces Jolley’s own claim that later in his career, Malebranche abandoned his rationalist belief in the cognitive faculties. Effi cacious 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. Jolley’s argument for Malebranche’s abandoning the cognitive faculties is discussed later; for now, the important point to recognize is that the doctrine of effi cacious 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, pre-pares the way for this move by declaring that the effi cacious ideas acting on our soul replace Malebranche’s 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 alterna-tive 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 effi caciousness of ideas qua ideas and any claim that later in his career, Malebranche abandoned the faculties of intellect and will.

III. What “Effi cacious” Ideas Really Are

If we look closely at Malebranche’s 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 modifi cations of God: he


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 God’s 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 infi nite 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 modifi cations He produces in our soul.69 We do not see the entire essence of God; we only see aspects of God’s substance, insofar as it represents the beings we see.70 As Malebranche explains this in the Dialogues between a Christian and a Chinese Philosopher (1707–8):

Thus, God, the infi nitely 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 infi nite essence includes all there is of true reality in all fi nite beings. Thus God alone acts immediately in our soul; He alone is our life, our light, and our wisdom.71


Given Malebranche’s doctrine of occasionalism, only God has causal power, only He can act on us. Given Malebranche’s 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 restric-tion, exceeds our fi nite reason’s comprehension, we cannot perceive God in his absolute essence. Taking these three philosophical claims together, it follows that when God, the only effi cacious substance, acts on us in sensory or intellectual perception, He reveals to us only a certain aspect of His essence—the 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 mind’s 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 Régis, 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 God’s 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, Malebranche’s 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’


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 God—they do not and could not encompass His infi nite essence.77 And we see creatures when God acts on us and reveals these different aspects of His essence to us.

Awareness of Malebranche’s eagerness to give argumentative support for his bedrock philosophical claim—all things depend on God—should 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 Malebranche’s system on the issue of representation’s mechanism. But this concern does not render less anachronistic attempts of some critics to fi ll in the gap with a strong doctrine of effi cacious ideas. Unfortunately for his readers, Malebranche leaves the divine ideas’ representative function sui generis.79


IV. The Mind’s Attention: Why Malebranche Does Not Need Effi cacious 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 effi cacious ideas—with its implicit attack on the mind’s cognitive and volitional capacities—does not. This fi nal section offers an alternative account of the role of the cognitive faculties in Malebranche’s metaphysics. For while we are passive in our (initial) sensory perception,80 in the case of intellectual perception—whether focusing on a triangle’s properties or on determining whether something is our true good—the human mind does something to bring about its illumination. It exercises its power of attention, our will’s “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 pres-ence 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 Jolley’s 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 mind’s 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 Malebranche’s later, “mature” corpus. Malebranche arguably saw the Search as his masterwork, revising and making additions large and small through the fi nal, 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 understanding’s total passivity and inability to occasion the ideas God reveals to it from the will’s “attentive” ability to desire further information about a particular object, thereby occasioning further knowledge be revealed to the intellect—which knowledge the intellect has the capacity to apperceive. In On Physical Premo-tion (1715), Malebranche continued to emphasize the vital role of the will’s 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 modifi cations;


not by one’s 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 will’s 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 fi xing 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 every-thing, and only “communicates” His power to fi nite agents in making their desires occasional causes that determine the effi cacy of certain general laws, their desires “certainly are in their power, because without this, it is clear that they wouldn’t 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 effi cacious ideas: it is through our exercise of our will’s God-given ability to focus our attention—to retreat from the senses into the mind


and form a practical desire for enlightenment—and our understanding’s 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 modifi -cations; the will, which Malebranche describes as our soul’s natural move-ment 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 will’s ability to desire further knowledge is the occasional cause of the mind’s enlightenment. As such, Malebranche con-ceived 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 Malebranche’s 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 mind’s attention that all truths are discovered, and all sciences are learned; indeed, the mind’s attention is nothing but its return and conversion to God.”93 A full characterization of human cognition must also discuss the will’s role in occasioning the understanding’s receipt of cognitive materials.

Jolley, however, ignores the will’s role in the quest for truth and focuses on the Search’s 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 illumi-nation that allow it to be related to ideas; “the mind’s intrinsic state is simply one of darkness.”95


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 Jolley’s thesis must be extended to include the Search as well, or we cannot take this stricture as evidence of a change in Malebranche’s thought. Throughout both of these works Malebranche emphatically denies all causal effi caciousness 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 modifi cations, 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 Augustine’s 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 Elu-cidation where Malebranche compares those who give the mind a produc-tive 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 fi re 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 fi gure and motion, has in itself a force, a faculty, a nature, by which it can move itself or give itself now a round fi gure, 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


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 being’s activity. Scholastic natures play a real causal role in created beings’ actions. Malebranche is rejecting the doctrine that created beings have causal effi cacy, 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 Malebranche’s 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 effi cacious ideas to fi ll this void, both stem from failing to consider the role of the will and its activity throughout Malebranche’s 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-fl edged manifestation of the human will’s 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 mind’s 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 effi cacy. The disturbances excited in my brain are the occasional or natural causes of my sensations. But the occasional


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 will’s attention procured (via God’s effi cacy) intelligible objects for the understanding’s perception and illumination. There is no “void” for effi cacious ideas to fi ll here in explain-ing the union between the divine and human mind—instead, the doctrine of idea–agents creates a false picture of Malebranche’s metaphysics. The mental mechanism brought about by strong effi cacious ideas, made explicit by Jolley, is implicit in the doctrine itself.

As discussed earlier, Robinet also dismisses the role of the will’s attention as the occasional cause of God revealing ideas; indeed, he argues that once effi cacious ideas take over, so to speak, both attention and the body’s 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 Jolley’s, seems untrue to Malebranche’s texts. For example, Robinet dismisses the explicit language of God teaching us “by the effi cacious application of his ideas to our minds” in Malebranche’s long addition to the 1695 version of Christian Conversations as “prior” to Malebranche’s “new” position on ideas.101 Instead, Robinet declares that Malebranche only revealed his “last solution” of effi cacious 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 minds”103 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 infi nitely 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 fi fteenth Christian and Metaphysical Meditations (1683/fi nal 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


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 will’s desire for enlightenment fl ows from its invinci-ble desire to be happy; but its attentive desires do occasion ideas being shown to the understanding.

In the preface to his fi rst work, The Search after Truth, Malebranche states that intellection and volition are the key to the mind’s 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 fi nal work, On Physical Premotion, Malebranche notes that God made the fi rst 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 one’s end, seek one’s good, where God fi nds his own.110

The cognitive faculties remain: they depend upon God and constitute our relation to God, a relation so defi nitive 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 Jolley’s claim that Malebranche’s late philosophy abandons all mental faculties, nor Robinet and Schmaltz’s espousal of strong effi cacious ideas, can be sustained.

In sum, the bridge between the divine and human reason is not via effi cacious ideas: it is through our exercise of our God-given ability to focus our mental attention—to retreat from the senses into the mind and form a practical desire for the understanding’s enlightenment or further knowl-edge. 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 idea–agents that Jolley, Robinet, and Schmaltz attribute to him. Careful consideration of the role of attention in Malebranche’s 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,


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 will’s desire for closer inspection of and the mind’s 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 one’s ideas.”112 Any account of Malebranche’s philosophy that banishes our faculties of understanding and will and replaces them with effi cacious ideas misses the very nature of the human and divine minds in Malebranche’s metaphysics.113

Chapter 5

Attending to Malebranche’s Agent Causation

. . . 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 fi nal paragraphs of On Physical Premotion (henceforth PPM), published mere months before Malebranche’s 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 Malebranche’s least read work and has not been translated from the French. This over-sight is unfortunate, as PPM has a succinct and informative overview of Malebranche’s considered position on human freedom. As such, I will not offer a chronological development of his views on the human will’s power,1 but beginat the end, supplementing with earlier material as needed to fl esh out his account.

This fi nal chapter answers the question of how Malebranche explains and justifi es the human will’s purported ability to govern its activity. The prob-lem here should be obvious: given Malebranche’s 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 incom-patible. Worse still, Malebranche’s stress on God’s 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

Attending to Malebranche’s Agent Causation 91

beings—not God—responsible for these fl aws in a system where God appears to be the only candidate for action and thus for responsibility.

Commentators from Malebranche’s 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 Malebranche’s 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 choices—when they consent, withhold consent, and focus their intellectual attention—they act as agent causes bringing about a merely immanent change, not as mere bearers of event-states 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 (espe-cially of the theistic variety). Instead of looking to Thomas Reid as their philosophical ancestor3, indeterminists could profi t from closely reading Malebranche’s works.

I. Malebranche on the Will, Freedom, and Grace

Malebranche’s fi nal work was a response to the 1713 publication of Laurent Boursier’s De L’action de Dieu sur les créatures: traité dans lesquels on prouve la prémotion physique par le raisonnement. Et où l’on examine plusieurs questions qui ont rapport à la nature des esprits et à la grâce.4 Boursier accepts some of Malebranche’s tenets—the passivity of matter, for instance, and its total determination in its motion by God—and 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 fi rst 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


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 general—there 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 attrac-tion 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 specifi es 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 fi ll our vast desire to be happy—and only God could satisfy that desire—the soul is not determined to consent to any particular good.11

Here we may profi tably supplement Malebranche’s 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


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 good-ness, 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, exemplifi ed 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. There-fore, 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 abso-lutely 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 freedom—consenting only to the truth and absolutely loving only God—is 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?


Malebranche fi rst attempted to respond to such charges of inconsistency in his fi rst 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 specifi cally, 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 Boursier’s defi nition differentiates them from Malebranche’s, 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 effi cacious divine motion, the [human] will cannot either fail to do the act effi caciously 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 effi cacious divine will it cannot do other than consent to this motion. Malebranche challenges that Boursier cannot, on such a defi nition, attach any meaning to the claim that human agents act “freely.” Malebranche’s fi erce commitment to the principle of alternative possibilities undermines those who would interpret him as extending divine control even to the will’s 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 fulfi llment.”23 This premotion is called physical, not in contrast


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 specifi cationem actus (for an end or insofar as a specifi cation 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 physi-cal 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 infal-libly, 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 will—no matter what its source—cannot be free if its consent is infal-libly 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 fi nd 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 [Boursier’s] true design, which appears from reading his book, is to demonstrate that inte-rior grace is not only effi cacious in itself, in relation to the will that it actually moves [toward the true good] . . . he pretends further that grace’s movement by its very nature and by itself, is effi cacious 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 won’t consent to it.25

Malebranche argues throughout this work that Boursier’s claim of God physically predetermining the soul is at bottom the same as Antoine Arnauld’s Jansenist insistence on effi cacious grace. We cannot feel or resist


the fi rst 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 fi ll 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 God’s grace. Malebranche reminds his readers that it is not worthy of an infi nite being to act by a multiplicity of particular wills; rather, God accomplishes the infi -nite 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 suffi ces that that order pro-duce a work proportioned to the simplicity of his laws, in order that it be worthy of the wisdom of its author. For fi nally 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 effi cacy when it does arrive. They must avoid occasions of sin and thus “remove some impediments to the effi cacy 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


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 one’s 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 Malebranche’s theory of the human will. For within his theory ought does imply can—and if he challenges his readers to align their wills with God’s, 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, pro-duce 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 Christ’s 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-à-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 concupiscence—an 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 fl eshly 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 cause—in the case of sensible plea-sures, toward sensible objects. Sensory pleasures fi ll up our soul’s 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 occa-sional 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 God’s.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


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 “effi cacious grace” and Boursier’s “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 senti-ment livelier. But he claims that “one cannot know or sense the physical premotion the Thomists admit.”37 Physical premotion, on this reading,collapses into God’s action itself—which 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 Boursier’s claim that the soul is still free on his account of physical premotion, since we cannot consent to a motion or motive that we don’t sense or feel and that doesn’t 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 effi cacious, 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 effi cacious, 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. But—and this is the key for Malebranche—neither this nor any other pleasure determines the free movement or consent of the will. Plea-sure 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 doesn’t sense it at all.”40

The kind of grace most relevant to Malebranche’s 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 fi xed 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


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 goods—and 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 magni-tude 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 knowl-edge gained through this enlightenment can, in turn, call us to align our will with God’s. 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 con-sent, 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 Order—which 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


Indeed, Malebranche argues that although faith (given through the grace of Christ) may be suffi cient for salvation of the weak, carnal man, the ratio-nal 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 eter-nal 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 imagina-tion to be attentive to the voice or reason is strength of mind. Since this ability to exercise our attention is diffi cult, Malebranche warns his readers that they must start practicing it early in life, as it—like all habits—is 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 modifi cation 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 mind’s power over its attentive desires—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.

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


through the motion that God impresses on it—yet 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 Christ’s thoughts have his desires as their occasional causes, “for he thinks of what he wants.”56 He contrasts a body’s 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 infi nitely perfect being) and so He can only make us invincibly love Himself. Our liberty turns on this non- invincibility vis-à-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 fi ght for the conservation and augmentation of their freedom; not being able to sup-port the effort of examining apparent goods, they imprudently consent to everything which fl atters 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 fi nd other


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 fi nds 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 don’t 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 Christ’s sacrifi ce, 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 hap-piness. 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 soul’s 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 disposi-tion 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


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 soul’s 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 free-dom. 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 one’s 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 fi rst place because we suspend judgment and freely fi x 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 merit—only 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 one’s reason.”73 One can always suspend consent “in order to choose whether one will follow one’s reason or one’s senses”74; to merit and to be true to one’s rational nature, one must choose the former. Yet the question remains: how precisely do fi nite 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 Malebranche’s last work in the hope of a more complete answer.

II. The Physical, the Moral, and Malebranche’s Agent Causation

In PPM’s account of what we do when we consent, Malebranche develops the distinction he gestured at in the fi rst Elucidation by saying God does


everything “material” or “real” in us. Now he contrasts the “physical” with the “moral.” According to Malebranche, the physical—such as the sensa-tions we feel and our natural attraction to objects—is what God does “in us without us.”75 In moral—such as the consent we give or withhold to such sensations—is what God does “in us with us.”76 For as he comments else-where, 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 [indiliberés] motions, with our consents or our free determinations of our will”: for whereas God alone, acting “in us without us,”78 produces the fi rst, it is we who consent or resist pull of attrac-tion 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 powers—and that the fi rst “is properly speak-ing only the action of God in her.”79 This is the constant forward motion of desire toward the general good, the soul’s 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 effi caciousness of the will of God that recre-ates them in different places.”80 The soul’s 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


a change in our soul’s internal make-up and thus appears to be an instance of our modifying ourselves, of bringing about an event, and thus violates Malebranche’s 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 God—“but 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/modifi cation ontology is rearing its ugly head. Malebranche accepts the Cartesian classifi cation of beings into substances and their modes as exhaustive. “For in the fi nal analysis, it is absolutely necessary that every-thing in the world be either a being or a mode of a being—which no atten-tive mind can deny.”87 Yet if God creates beings and all ways of being, this insistence on human freedom appears inconsistent with Malebranche’s metaphysics.

Malebranche’s 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 soul’s power:

One must have a clear ideas of the soul that is to say, see the archetype on which God formed it, to defi ne or clearly explain what is its activity, its power of producing these immanent acts, by which she [the soul] acqui-esces or doesn’t 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 one-self, 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 soul’s 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


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 good-ness by allying their wills and intellects with His, even if they don’t know what in them permits this. Admittedly, this answer feels like a cop-out on Malebranche’s part. When we remember that Malebranche’s 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 Boursier’s fashion that “there is a contradiction, that given premotion, it [the will] doesn’t 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 responsi-ble 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 God’s attributes is a non-starter.

Malebranche uses an analogy to explain how physical premotion confl icts with the proper account of God. Suppose, he says, that a work-man 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 doesn’t 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 incom-parable 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


Boursier-style Thomists. Malebranche rejects the doctrines of physical premotion and effi cacious 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. God’s willings cannot be arbitrary, cannot be their own justifi cation. God is infi nitely 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 desireto 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 laws—laws 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 free—free 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’ enlighten-ment 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-même] and in the movements regulated according to the immutable


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 Malebranche’s 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 Malebranche’s devel-opment of attention as a form of immanent cause, akin to what contempo-rary 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 enlighten-ment. More specifi cally, even though our attention is only an occasional cause, and does not cause either the ideas we see or the sensations we feel, the soul’s desires do cause its internal state of attention. This power, however, does not violate the occasionalist tenet that God is the one true effi cient transeunt cause.

The contrast between a transeunt and immanent cause distinction devel-oped in medieval philosophy and came to Malebranche via Francisco Suarez, whose Metaphysical Disputations (1597) Malebranche attacked in the fi fteenth Elucidation to the Search. Malebranche obviously discarded the talk of species and form that went with Suarez’s 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 elicited”103 clearly impacted Malebranche.104 Malebranche makes grants to angelic and human minds “powers” that are self-contained, such as the mind’s power over some of its desires without violating occasionalism’s demand that true—that is, effi cient/transeunt—causal 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 effi cient causes of the knowledge that results from our volitions; God reveals His ideas to us;


we do not cause this revelation. But the mind is decidedly not inert, as is the material world.

Interestingly, from Malebranche’s original introduction of occasionalism in VI.2.3 of The Search after Truth, he focuses on matter’s inability to move itself or other bodies; but Malebranche says little about the mind’s ability to determine its particular willings in the fi rst place. Instead, Malebranche focuses on showing that our willings are ineffi cacious precisely because they neither move bodies nor cause ideas. Yet he does not give much consider-ation of our willing or focusing our attention as in itself problematic. Were he alive today, Malebranche would heartily endorse Alfred J. Freddoso’s claim that “according to occasionalism, God is the sole effi cient 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 infl uence of creatures who are acting freely.”105

For Malebranche the key to “real” causation comes from going outside of one’s 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 soul’s 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 effi cacy 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 God’s ideas—with the fact that because our wills produce nothing exter-nally they may be said to produce nothing as true causes. Indeed, the only change Malebranche made to this passage throughout the six editions of


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 “d’eux mesmes” (“from”) themselves, as stated in the fi rst 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 fi fteenth 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 effi cacy 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 arm’s movement, of my mind’s 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 incapa-ble of action, our inner sensation of ourselves convinces us that or willsare free.

Malebranche should be seen as an ancestor to libertarians such as Chisholm, who contrast “transeunt” or “event-event” causation with “imma-nent” or “agent” causation.109 In Malebranche’s version of this distinction, immanent causation is unique because it is self-contained and simultane-ous. It is a “basic act”110 that does not admit of further analysis. Malebranche himself never attempted a formal philosophical argument for how this


ability fi ts 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 willings—they are up to us. If we will to do F, the will to do F is ours, whereas only God can effi ciently 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 infi nite 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 Malebranche’s 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 modifi ca-tions of which our soul is capable or fully understand the status of the modifi cations 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 par-ticular willings the soul has an immanent—not effi cacious—power that bears a faint resemblance to the divine will’s all-powerful causal effi cacy. By using the knowledge gained through our attention to fully love only the one true good and thus willing to follow God’s 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 God’s law and they are what in us most resemble Him. Our will is active without being an effi cient 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 God’s law, permit us to exist more fully in


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 expla-nation 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 profi tably upon his construction.112

Notes

Chapter 1

1 All bibliographical information is from Y.M. André, La Vie de R.P. Malebranche (Paris: Ingold, 1886; reprint edition, Geneva: Slatkine Reprints, 1970).

2 Acts 17:28, Malebranche’s favorite Pauline dictum.3 Nicolas Malebranche, Oeuvres Complètes de Malebranche, ed. André Robinet (Paris:

J. Vrin, 1958–70), 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 Malebranche’s various works exist I have benefi ted 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.

4 OC I 10, SAT xxxiii–xxxiv.5 The French, of course, have always given him his due; check the bibliography for

the many French studies of Malebranche.6 Etienne Gilson, The Spirit of Mediaeval Philosophy, trans. A.H.C. Downes

(New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1940): 14–15.7 A.A. Luce, Berkeley and Malebranche: A Study in the Origins of Berkeley’s Thought

(New York: Garland Publishing Inc., 1988).8 Charles J. McCracken, Malebranche and British Philosophy (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1983): 14–15.9 Ibid., 19.

10 André Robinet, Malebranche et Leibniz: Relations Personelles (Paris: J. Vrin, 1955a).11 OC II 310, SAT 446.12 OC II 310, SAT 446.13 OC II 310–311, SAT 446–447.14 OC II 311, SAT 447.15 OC II 312, SAT 448.16 OC II 312–313, SAT 448–449. Malebranche makes a qualifi cation 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 Notes

17 OC II 313, SAT 448.18 See Chapters 4 and 5.19 OC II 314, SAT 450.20 OC II 313, SAT 448.21 OC II 312–317, SAT 448–451.22 OC II 316, SAT 450.23 OC II 318, SAT 451.24 OC II 319, SAT 452.25 For discussion of the Arnauld–Malebranche debate and its philosophical import,

see Chapter 3.26 OC V 12. Nicolas Malebranche, Treatise on Nature and Grace, trans. Patrick

Riley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992): 112. Henceforth TNG.27 OC V 13–15.28 They are, however, discussed in Chapters 2 and 5.29 OC V 28, TNG 116.30 OC V 28, TNG 116.31 God’s action and general volitions are discussed extensively in Chapter 2,

especially in sections II and III.32 OC V 30, TNG 117. Malebranche’s laws of motion, like Descartes’, were problem-

atic; unlike Descartes, however, he revised his many times over the years—especially in response to criticisms by Leibniz. For the latter, see Robinet 1955a.

33 OC V 31, TNG 118.34 OC V 32, TNG 118.35 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.

36 OC XII 150–151, DM 107.37 OC XII 154–155, DM 110–111.38 OC XXII 155, DM 111.39 OC XII 155–157, DM 112–114.40 OC XII 160, DM 115–116.41 OC XII 160–161, DM 116.42 OC XII 165, DM 120. See Chapter 2.43 OC XII 165, DM 120. See Chapter 2.44 Thomas M. Lennon, “Philosophical Commentary” in SAT, pp. 810–811.45 On the question of Descartes’ occasionalism, see Daniel Garber, “How God

causes motion: Descartes, divine substance, and occasionalism,” Journal of Philosophy 84 (1987): 567–580; and Gary Hatfi eld, “Force (God) in Descartes’ Physics,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Vol. 10 (1979): 113–140. On Arnauld, see Steven Nadler, “Occasionalism and the Question of Arnauld’s Cartesianism,” in Descartes and His Contemporaries, eds. Roger Ariew and Marjorie Grene (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1005): 129–144. For dis-cussion 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): 57–73. For an overview of the issue of partial and full occasionalism in various seventeenth-century philosophers, see Steven

Notes 115

Nadler, “Coredmoy and Occasionalism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 43, No. 1 (2005): 37–54.

46 OC I 447, SAT 235. For more on God’s relation to order, see Chapter 2.47 OC I 416, SAT 218.48 OC I 447, SAT 232.49 OC I 413–414, SAT 217.50 See Chapter 4.51 OC I 414, SAT 217.52 OC I 418, SAT 220.53 OC I 418–419, SAT 220–221.54 A Scholastic Aristotelian scholar would fi nd many things to protest against in this

brief account, but the accuracy of Malebranche’s 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 percep-tion, see Alison Simmons, “Explaining Sense Perception: A Scholastic Challenge,” Philosophical Studies, Vol. 73 (1994): 257–275.

55 Steven Nadler makes a convincing case that Malebranche’s target here is Arnauld and Nicole’s 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): 309–314.

56 OC I 424, SAT 223.57 OC I 425, SAT 223.58 OC I 431, SAT 227.59 OC I 431, SAT 227.60 OC I 432, SAT 227.61 OC I 434, SAT 228.62 Tad Schmaltz has recently argued that Malebranche’s reasoning for the

Vision in God and his reasoning for occasionalism parallel one another in structure: for the fi rst, Malebranche focuses on God’s eminently containing creaturely perfections qualifying Him as the only being capable of represen-tation; for the second, Malebranche emphasizes God’s 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 Compan-ion to Malebranche, ed. Steven Nadler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 61–68.

63 OC I 434, SAT 228.64 OC I 434, SAT 229.65 OC I 434–435, SAT 229.66 OC I 435, SAT 229.67 OC I 436, SAT 229.68 OC I 437, SAT 230.69 OC I 437, SAT 230.70 OC I 438, SAT 230.71 OC I 438, SAT 231.72 OC I 438, SAT 231.73 OC I 441, SAT 232.

116 Notes

74 Consider also OC XII 57–58, DM 27: “However, I maintain you could formgeneral ideas only because you fi nd enough reality in the idea of the infi nite to give the idea of generality to your ideas. You can think of an indeterminate diameter only because you see the infi nite in extension and can increase or decrease extension to infi nity. I hold that you could never think of these abstract forms of genera and species were the idea of infi nity, 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 fi nite and determinate idea can ever represent anything infi -nite and indeterminate. But the mind unrefl ectively joins the idea of generality which fi nds in the infi nite to its fi nite ideas.”

75 OC III 149, SAT 625.76 OC XII 143, DM 14–15. This claim is controversial and at the heart of the

Arnauld–Malebranche debate; see Chapter 3.77 OC XII 143, DM 15.78 OC I 441, DM 232.79 OC XII 51–52, DM 21–22.80 OC I 441, SAT 232. See Chapter 4.81 David Scott, On Malebranche (Australia: Wadsworth-Thomason Learning

2002): 61–62.82 Concepts move our bare grasping of sensory data to a seeing that something

is so. See Robert Audi’s discussion of perception in Robert Audi, Epistemology: A Contemporary Introduction to the Theory of Knowledge (New York: Routledge 2003): 16–30.

83 OC I 442, SAT 233.84 OC I 10, SAT xxxiv.85 OC I 443, SAT 223.86 OC I 445, SAT 234.87 OC III 154, SAT 627–628.88 OC I 446, SAT 235.89 OC XII 69, DM 36.90 OC XII 103–108, DM 66–70.91 OC XII 122, DM 82.92 OX XII 289, DM 226; emphasis added.

Chapter 2

1 OC XII 183–184, DM 135. See also OC X 40, OC XV 3, OC XV 10, and OC XVI 59.

2 See, e.g., OC III 148, SAT 624, OC XII 185, and DM 137–138.3 OC VII 248. This issue of containment turns also on the point that God does

not contain His ideas as modifi cations or as individual substances—rather, God’s ideas are the divine substance. See Chapter 4.

4 OC XII 183, DM 135.5 OC XII 191, DM 142.6 OC XII 191, DM 142.

Notes 117

7 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.

8 OC XII 175, DM 128.9 OC III 128, SAT 613.

10 One refreshing exception is Andrew Pyle’s recent work Malebranche (London: Routledge, 2003), chapter 3.

11 Rene Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes, ed. Charles Adam and Paul Tannery (11 vols) (Paris: CNRS/Vrin, 1964–74), 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, 1984–91), 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, “God’s Immutability and the Necessity of Descartes’s Eternal Truths,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 43, No. 1 (2005): 1–19, which also contains extensive citations of the literature on this issue.

12 OC III 132, SAT 615.13 OC III 132, SAT 615.14 Ginette Dreyfus, La Volonté selon Malebranche (Paris: Librairie J. Vrin, 1958): 36.15 Ibid., 36–37.16 OC III 140, SAT 620.17 OC V 33, TNG 119.18 OC III 138, SAT 619. See also OC XVII-1 752–753.19 OC III 72, SAT 579.20 OC III 137, SAT 618.21 OC III 134, SAT 616.22 OC XII 200, DM 151. See also OC XII 194–195, DM 146.23 OC V 38, TNG 121.24 OC V 110. See TNG 162.25 OC XII 178, DM 131.26 Dreyfus 1958 39.27 See OC V 15, TNG 112, OC V 40, 122.28 OC XII 205, DM 155.29 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 fi nite creatures our praises are not worthy of the infi nite. 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 sacrifi ces of pleasing fragrance.” OC XII 206, DM 156.

30 OC V 28, TNG 116.31 OC XII 214, DM 163.32 For a comparison of the theodicies of Malebranche and Leibniz (through the

fi lter 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): 147–163. See

118 Notes

also Donald P. Rutherford, “Natures, Laws, and Miracles: The Roots of Leibniz’s 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).

33 OC V 29, TNG 117.34 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. 114–120.

35 OC V 32, TNG 119.36 OC V 31–32, TNG 118.37 OC XII 215–216, 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 where—after he has started to “get it”—he summarizes his Master Theodore’s 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.

38 OC V 46, TNG 126.39 OC V 46, TNG 127.40 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): 690–721.

41 OC V 46, TNG 127.42 OC V 52, TNG 131.43 OC V 50–51, TNG 129–130.44 OC XI 25–26, TE 50; emphasis added.45 OC V 167, TNG 211.46 OC V 167, TNG 212.47 OC XI 32, TE 55.48 OX XII 292, DM 229.49 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, “Malebranche’s Distinction Between General and Particular Volitions,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 39, No. 1 (January 2001): 77–99.

50 Arnauld to Leibniz, March 4, 1687, Die Philosophischen Schriften von Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, 7 vols, ed. C.J. Gerhardt (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1960–62) 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 quota-tion is not defi nitive proof, however, that Arnauld equated God’s 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 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 Malebranche—wants created beings to have their own productive natures. Arnauld’s later letter exhibits his understanding of this difference in the systems; however, he clearly has begun to wonder how God’s setting up an initial pre-established harmony among creatures, even one that unfolds due to their “natures,” differs from God’s setting up and then following himself the laws of nature. In both cases God ultimately decides what will happen, even if Leibniz’s creatures actively carry out this plan and Malebranche’s creatures passively receive it.

51 I Nadler 33–37.52 Emphasis in the original; ibid., 41–42.53 Ibid., 43.54 See ibid., 44. Pessin is in strong agreement with Nadler here, arguing persua-

sively that Malebranche directly links generality with nomicity and particularity with anomicity; see Pessin 79–89.

55 OC V 147–148, TNG 195.56 Emphasis in the original; OC V 148, TNG 196.57 As cited in I Nadler 41.58 Desmond Clarke, “Malebranche and Occasionalism: A Reply to Steven Nadler,”

Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 33, No. 3 (1995): 499–504, p. 501.59 Ibid., 501.60 See ibid., 500.61 Ibid., 503, OC V 166, TNG 210–211.62 Clarke 503.63 OC V 166, TNG 211.64 My thanks to Lisa Downing for helpful discussion on this point.65 OC XII 177, DM 131.66 See, e.g., OC III 137, LO 618, OC VII 248, OC XII 182–183, DM 135–136,

OC XII 185, DM 137–138, OC X 40, OC XV 10, and OC XVI 59.67 OC XII 183, DM 136.68 OC XII 175–176, DM 129.69 Steven Nadler, “Malebranche’s Occasionalism: A Reply to Clarke,” Journal of the

History of Philosophy, Vol. 33, No. 3 (1995): 505–508, p. 507.70 Introduction to DM xxv.71 For similar reasons, I disagree with commentators who claim that Malebranche

changes his position (circa 1688 and onward) to make ideas themselves effi ca-cious. See my discussion in Chapter 4.

72 OC XII 161, DM 117.73 See OC XII 157, DM 112.74 OC XII 176, DM 129.75 OC XII 177, DM 130.76 OC XII 184, DM 137.77 OC XII 176, DM 130.78 OC XII 184, DM 135.79 I owe the example to Lisa Downing.80 OC XII 178, DM 131.

120 Notes

81 OC XII 179, DM 132.82 OC XII 176, DM 130.83 OC XII 180, DM 133.84 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 Offi ce of the Roman Index’s 1690 condemnation of this work. See OC XVIII 534–538 and IX (19) 550–559, 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 cartésiens. La Polémique entre Antoine Arnauld et Nicolas Malebranche (Paris: J. Vrin, 1999). For a shorter analysis of the pair’s mutual philosophical misunderstandings, see Denis Kambouchner, “Des Vraies et des Fausses Ténèbres: La Connaissance de L’âme d’après La Controverse avec Malebranche,” in Antoine Arnauld: Philosophe de Langage et de la Connaissance, éd. Jean-Claude Pariente (Paris: J. Vrin, 1995): 152–190.

2 Here I am in agreement with Aloyse-Raymond Ndiaye, who comments, “Arnauld lui-même ne s’est engage dans une longue polémique contre Malebranche, que parce qu’il étaient persuade que les erreurs théologique de l’oratorien sur la grâce étaient dues à sa philosophie des idées et de leur vision en Dieu”; Aloyse-Raymond Ndiaye, “Le Statue des Vérités Éternelle dans la Philosophie d’Antoine Arnauld: Cartésianisme ou Augustinisme?” in Antoine Arnauld, Chroniques de Port Royal 44 (Paris: Bibliothèque Mazarine, 2005): 283. Denis Moreau argues at length for this view of Arnauld’s motivation in attacking Malebranche in “The Malebranche–Arnauld Debates,” in The Cambridge Compan-ion to Malebranche, ed. Steven Nadler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 87–111.

3 Arnauld to Quesnel, October 18, 1682, OC (of Malebranche) XVIII 241–242, as cited/translated by Elmer J. Kremer in the introduction to his translation of Arnauld’s On True and False Ideas (Lewiston: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1990): xxi, note 39.

4 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 Jansénius in 1641 and 1645. See Jean Laporte, “Le Jansénism,” in Études d’histoire de la philosophie francaise au XVIIe siècle (Paris: Vrin, 1951): 88–105; Kremer 1990 xiii–xxiii; and Alexander Sedgwick, Jansenism in Seventeeth-Century France: Voices from the Wilderness (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1977).

5 For a discussion of Arnauld’s particular combination of Jansenism and Cartesian-ism, see Tad M. Schmaltz, “French Cartesianism in Context: The Paris Formulary

Notes 121

and Regis’s Usage,” in Receptions of Descartes: Cartesianism & Anti-Cartesianism in Early Modern Europe, ed. Tad M. Schmaltz (London: Routledge, 2005): 80–95. For more on Arnauld’s 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): 219–239.

6 Pelagius (ca. 360–431) emphasized human effort and responsibility for their own salvation, at the expense of divine grace; his disciple Celestius was excom-municated 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 417–418 (infl uenced by St. Augustine) condemned the Pelagian doctrine that human beings are inher-ently good and are saved by Christ’s teachings rather than actual grace. John A. Mourant, “Pelagius and Pelagianism,” in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Logic to Psychologism, Vols 5–6, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Collier Macmillan Publishers, 1967): 78–79.

7 Elmar J. Kremer, “Arnauld on the Nature of Ideas as a Topic in Logic: The Port-Royal Logic and On True and False Ideas,” in Logic & The Workings of the Mind, ed. Patricia Easton (Atascadero: Ridgeview, 1998): 67.

8 Indeed, as Steven Nadler has remarked, the theological stakes were high in the Malebranche–Arnauld 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 Malebranche’s represen-tationalism, he will thereby have destroyed his theory of the vision in God. It is, in effect, an easily grasped handle by means of which Malebranche’s whole edifi ce, theology and all, can be torn down. Arnauld’s real concern is with Malebranche’s views on God, grace, and other theological matters. The cri-tique of Malebranche’s representationalism thus becomes the philosophical linchpin in Arnauld’s attack on his unacceptable theology. This is, I believe, the real motivation behind Arnauld’s concern with perception.” Steven Nadler, Arnauld and the Cartesian Philosophy of Ideas (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989): 139.

9 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.

10 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 substance’—understanding 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.

11 See, e.g., Descartes CSM I 204–205, AT VIIIA 17–20; CSM II 39, AT VII 56–57; CSMK 182, AT III 369.

12 AT IV 113–114, CSMK 232.13 TFI 19.14 Ibid.

122 Notes

15 Emphasis in the original; Nadler 1989 110. Unfortunately, considerations of length prevent my engaging the debate over how to understand Arnauld’s theory of perception—as 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, “Arnauld’s Alleged Representationalism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. XII, No. 1 (January 1974); Daisie Radner, “Representationalism in Arnauld’s Act Theory of Perception,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 14, No. 1 (January 1976); and Elmer J. Kremer, “Arnauld’s 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 Arnauld’s conception of an active intellect limited and shaped how he conceived of the nature of ideas in general, not the specifi c theory of visual perception that that entails.

16 Emphasis in the original; TFI 20.17 AT 7 40, CSM 2 27–28.18 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).

19 TFI 19.20 Or, more specifi cally, superfl uous 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): 73–74.

21 R.W. Church argues that the rejection of passivity is the heart of Arnauld’s 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 meaningless—though 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 Arnauld–Malebranche debate boils down to “[w]hether our cognitive acts essentially exhibit their objects to us, or whether they are exhibited to usby something else,” in Malebranche’s case, by God and His divine ideas; Kremer 1998 69.

22 Emphasis in the original; TFI 20.23 TFI 19–20.24 Radner 1976, 98. Sara Garcia-Gomez also comments on Arnauld’s failure to be

“specifi c about the manner in which the soul is able to do this [form its own inherently representative ideas]”; see Sara Garcia-Gomez, “Arnauld’s Theory of Ideative Knowledge,” The Monist, Vol. 71, No. 4 (October 1988): 553.

Notes 123

25 Emphasis in the original; TFI 21. Compare to Descartes CSM II 74–75, AT VII 102–103.

26 Kremer 1994 93.27 Ibid., 94.28 Cook 1974 61.29 VFI 25, quoted in Kremer 1994 95.30 Kremer 1994 95.31 Emphasis in the original; VFI 33, quoted in ibid., 95–96.32 Kremer 1994 96.33 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): 317–337; Monte Cook, “Descartes’ Alleged Representationalism,” History of Philosophy Quarterly, Vol. 4, No. 2 (April 1987): 179–195; Michael J. Costa, “What Cartesian Ideas are Not,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 21 (1983): 537–549; Thomas M. Lennon, “The Inherence Pattern and Descartes’ Ideas,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 12, No. 1 (1974): 43–52; Ian Tipton, “‘Ideas’ and Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 13 (1975): 145–166; and John W. Yolton, “Representation and Realism: Some Refl ections on the Way of Ideas,” Mind, Vol. XCVI, No. 383 (July 1987): 318–330. For an excellent response to these approaches and defense of Descartes as representa-tionalist, see Margaret Dualer Wilson, “Descartes on Sense and Resemblance,” in Ideas and Mechanism: Essays on Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999): 10–25.

34 Vere Chappell, “The Theory of Ideas,” in Essays on Descartes’ Meditations, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986): 179.

35 VFI 112–115.36 OC VI 96.37 OC I 417, SAT 219.38 OC I 414, SAT 217.39 OC I 437, SAT 230.40 See OC VI 61 and the discussion in Steven Nadler, Malebranche & Ideas

(New York: Oxford University Press 1992): 62–66.41 OC VI 98.42 OC VI 136–137.43 OC I 442, SAT 232.44 OC VI 77.45 See Nadler 1989 and other articles from note 15.46 OC VI 184.47 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 Malebranche’s attempt to answer it is too complex to throw in here—it will be discussed (if not fully resolved) in Chapter 4.

48 OC VI 56.49 OC VI 56 (Malebranche quoting from The Search).50 Radner 1978 65–66.

124 Notes

51 OC I 441–442, SAT 232.52 OC VI 61.53 See also OC VIII–IX 925.54 Scott 2002 50.55 OC VI 65.56 OC VI 148.57 Emphasis in the original; OC VI 169–170.58 OC VI 181.59 OC VI 81.60 OC VI 160.61 See OC III 163–171, SAT 633–638, and OC X 102–106.62 OC VI 161.63 OC VI 105.64 OC VI 170.65 Emphasis in the original; OC VI 127.66 OC VI 179–180.67 OC VI 181.68 Malebranche blithely states in the Response that human beings’ desires are

“certainly in their power, because without that, it is clear that they wouldn’t 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 Hatfi eld, “The Cognitive Faculties,” in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy Volume II, ed. Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, 1998): 953–1002; “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): 21–46; The Natural and the Normative (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990), chapters 1 and 2; Michael Ayers, “Theories of Knowledge and Belief,” in Garber and Ayers 1003–1061.

2 See Daniel Garber, “Semel in vita: The Scientifi c Background to Descartes’ Medi-tations,” in Essays on Descartes’ Meditations, ed. Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986): 81–116; and Gary Hatfi eld, “The Senses and the Fleshless Eye: The Meditations as Cognitive Exercises,” in Rorty 45–80.

3 For an excellent discussion of Arnauld’s take on logic’s role in training our faculties, see Elmar J. Kremer, “Arnauld on Ideas as a Topic in Logic,” in Easton 1997 65–82.

4 I use the term “rationalist” with full acknowledgment that it is an unwieldyinvention 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 125

5 Malebranche breaks with Descartes in denying that we have a clear and distinct perception of the soul’s essence. See Elucidation 7, OC III 67–69, SAT 577–578. However, his overall epistemological framework remains Cartesian.

6 Ferdinand Alquié, Le Cartésianisme de Malebranche (Paris: Vrin, 1974): esp. 208–212; André Robinet, Système et Existence dans l’oeuvre de Malebranche (Paris: Vrin, 1955): esp. 259–284. Robinet initiated the discussion of effi cacious ideas; Alquié introduced the terminology of vision “en” versus vision “par” God. Robinet changed his initial date of 1695 as the emergence of the doc-trine of effi cacious ideas to 1694, thanks to Alquié’s discovery of a letter dated January 14, 1694, which states “it is precisely what one sees that affects the soul by its effi caciousness,” Alquié 209, OC XVIII 280.

7 More recently, Tad Schmaltz has also speculated that concerns to answer critics pushed Malebranche to introduce effi cacious ideas to explain “how the soul changes when it apprehends pure ideas in God.” Tad Schmaltz, Malebranche’s Theory of the Soul: A Cartesian Interpretation (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996): 101. Section II will elaborate more on the specifi c problems critics see a “strong” doctrine of effi cacious ideas as solving.

8 Robinet 1955 262 ff.12; André Robinet, “Variations sur “Idée Effi cace,” in Le Regard d’Henri 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 éxperience religieuse (Paris: J. Vrin, 1948): 323–325.

9 Nicholas Jolley, “Intellect and Illumination in Malebranche,” Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 32, No. 2 (April 1994): 216; emphasis added.

10 Ibid., 215.11 All translations my own, unless otherwise noted. Although I have preferred to

use my own translations, I have certainly benefi ted from consulting both Dia-logues 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 17–18, SAT xxiv.

12 OC XII 33, DM 7. See also OC XVI 58.13 See OC I 424, SAT 223.14 See OC III 149, SAT 625.15 Malebranche argues that God, as being without restriction, can contain the idea

of extension without being formally extended, unlike the soul—which 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.

16 See OC VII 251.17 See OC III 148: “Can’t 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 infi nite being, and that the soul is a kind of particular being? It is a property of the infi nite being to be simultaneously one and all things, composed so to speak

126 Notes

of an infi nity 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 infi nite, it makes [fait] all of the divine being.”

18 OC XVI 132. See also OC XVI 116–122, 138.19 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, “Foucher’s and de Mairan’s Critiques of Malebranche’s 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.

20 Jolley 1994.21 Ibid., 215.22 Ibid., 216.23 Ibid.24 Tad Schmaltz follows a similar line. See his Malebranche’s 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): 59–86.

25 Alquié 209.26 “But I speak principally here about material things which certainly can’t 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 discus-sion in Nadler 1992 71–73, which helped clarify my thoughts on this point.

27 “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 suffi ces 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. Isn’t 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 312–323, SAT 448–449, OC XIII 150–155, DM 107–111.

28 Schmaltz 1996 100.29 Robinet 1955 167–168.30 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 Jolley’s line of completely rejecting all mental faculties: see Schmaltz 1996 98–101.

31 OC XII 116, DM 77.32 God is not a “bundle” of ideas—this would violate the divine simplicity.

Malebranche argues that every idea or perfection in God, being infi nite, con-tains 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 infi nitely perfect being.

Notes 127

33 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 primi-tively possessed of intentional or representational content, and by which God acts or manifests His effi cacity; and they are ‘possible’ insofar as they are considered independently of whether they are exercised or actualized or under-taken 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 effi cacious ideas and his belief that God acts via his will/divine volitions. I will leave it to Pessin himself to fl esh out his complex argument. However, I believe that it fi ts with the account I am developing, by rejecting the view of ideas as agents with effi cacy independent of the divine will.

34 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 defi nes 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 concep-tion,” ibid., 12.

35 See Gary Hatfi eld in Rorty 1986.36 Here I am in agreement with Nadler 1992 6.37 Alquié 211.38 Ibid.; emphasis added.39 As Gouhier elegantly describes this, “Avec un langage forgé pour la vie des sens,

Malebranche s’approche des choses spirituelles et essaie de les rendre transpar-entes; à nous de répondre à son effort en transcendent ce langage pour saisir les choses spirituelles, pour capter sa pensée avant toute expression. Alors nous verrons peut-etre qu’une idée n’est pas nécessairement attachée à une seul mét-aphore, qu’une meme idée s’est glisée sous plusieurs images, que le philosophe comme l’artiste a essayé plusieurs formes, et ce sont toutes ces formes, et non une seule, qui, s’éclairant les unes les autres, doivent nous conduire à la percep-tion sereine où Malebranche s’est reposé,” 314.

40 OC XVI 119.41 OC XV 9; emphasis added.42 Robinet 274.43 OC XVI 66; my emphasis. See also OC XVI 67.44 OC XII 155.45 OC II 316, SAT 450.46 OC III 205, SAT 658; emphasis added.47 OC XVI 132.48 Schmaltz 1996 79.

128 Notes

49 Emphasis added; Nadler 1992 77. In the same book, see also note 28 on p. 77 and note 30 on p. 79.

50 Nadler 1992 176. For the full account, see Nadler 1992 chapter 5, 152–182.51 For a critical response to Nadler’s account, see David Scott, “Malebranche’s

Indirect Realism: A Critique of Steven Nadler,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Vol. 4 (1996): 53–78. For commentators who interpret Malebranche as holding a representative theory of perception, see Gueroult, Malebranche Vol. 1, 88–90; Nicolas Jolley, The Light of the Soul (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990): 85–98; McRae, “‘Idea’ as a Philosophical Term in the Seventeenth Century,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 26 (1965): 175–184; Daisie Radner, Malebranche (Amsterdam: Van Gorcum, 1978): 12–14; Geneniève Rodis-Lewis, Nicolas Malebranche (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963).

52 My thanks to an anonymous reviewer of the Journal of the History of Philosophy for pointing out how Nadler’s interpretation might be seen as buttressing my own case contra Jolley.

53 Jolley 1990 87.54 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., 77–78. Yet Malebranche does not confl ate 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 fi nite mat-ter, fi nite mind, and God quickly reveal that only God’s omnipotence can fi ll 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 mis-take. 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): 40–41.

55 OC I 10, SAT XIX.56 OC I 16, SAT XXIV.57 Martial Gueroult, Malebranche. 3 Vols (Paris: Aubier, 1959): 179.58 OC XIII 407.59 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 specifi es a page-and-a-half later that “I say that we see all things in God by the effi cacy of his substance, and in particu-lar sensible objects, by God’s applying intelligible extension to our mind in a thousand different ways.” OC III 154; my emphasis.

Notes 129

60 Emphasis in the original; OC VI 129.61 OC VI 125.62 See OC II 314–318, OC III 241–243, OC XII 319.63 “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.

64 Jolley 1994 219.65 OC VI 118; emphasis added. See also OC XII 54.66 Schmaltz does explicitly state that he does not follow Jolley’s 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 effi cacious ideas places on Malebranche’s occasionalist metaphysics and rationalist commitments to the human faculties of intellect and volition. See Schmaltz 1996 98–101.

67 Robinet 1955 263.68 OC XII 51, DM 21; emphasis added. See also OC XII 55.69 The details of how precisely the relationship between the idea of intelligible

extension and the sensory modifi cation yields a representative perception is a diffi cult 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 Malgré Lui?: Malebranche, de Mairan, and Intelligible Extension,” History of Philosophy Quarterly, Vol. 15, No. 2 (April 1998): 191–203; Steven Nadler, Arnauld and the Cartesian Philosophy of Ideas (Princeton; Princeton University Press, 1989); and Jean Laporte, L’étendue intel-ligible selon Malebranche, (Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 1938).

70 See also OC IV 72. “I say in a sense that He [God] is seen: because ideas of crea-tures are not the substance of the Divinity taken absolutely, but perceived insofar as imperfectly participable.”

71 OC XV 23; emphasis added.72 OC I 437, SAT 230.73 OC I 437, SAT 230.74 OC 17–1 303.75 OC I 97–98, SAT 319.76 St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theolgica, trans. Anton C. Pegis in Basic Writings of

St. Thomas Aquinas: Volume I (New York: Random House, 1944): 164–165. For more on participation in Aquinas, see James Ross, “Religious Language,” in Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Brain Davies (Oxford: Oxford Univer-sity Press, 1993): 106–135; 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): 94–131. Malebranche also discusses the concept of participation in OC IV 101 and in the Preface to the Dialogues (added in 1696), OC XII 12–13, 24.

77 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): 525–544.

78 OC III 120, SAT 613.

130 Notes

79 To be fair to Malebranche, he is at least no worse off than his contemporaries on this score—I 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 Régis.” Nadler 1992 49–50.

80 Sensory perception depends upon the impact of other bodies with our organs, and as such is governed by laws of body–body 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 mind–body union. Detailed discussion of the metaphysics of sensory perception is beyond the scope of the chapter.

81 OC VI 177–178.82 Jolley 1994 216; emphasis added.83 OC I 76, SAT 79.84 See OC XII 289–290: “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 wouldn’t 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 296–300.

85 OC XVI 48;, emphasis added. See also OC XVI 49.86 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 5.87 OC I 407, SAT 212.88 OC XVI 141.89 As briefl y discussed later, according to Malebranche, the human will is the

“impression or natural impulse that carries us toward the general and indetermi-nate 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 will—for it is not in our power not to love the good in general, not to wish to be happy (OC I 46–47, SAT 4–5). 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 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).

90 OC XIII 434.91 OCM I 43, SAT 3; OCM I 46, SAT 4–5.92 OCM I 20, SAT XXV.93 OCM I 16, SAT XXIV; emphasis added.94 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 soul–body 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): 347–369. See also Tad Schmaltz’s discussion of the role of these senses and imagination in drawing our attention to the idea of extension, Schmaltz 1996 103–108.

95 Jolley 1994 212.96 Emphasis in the original; OCM III 144–145, SAT 622.97 OCM III 145, SAT 622–623.98 Jolley 1994 215.99 OC XIII 288–289, DM 226; emphasis added.

100 Robinet 1955 283.101 Ibid., 259 ff 2; emphasis added.102 Ibid.103 OC VI 63; emphasis added.104 OC VI 64; emphasis added.105 See OC XIII 187–188, DM 139–140.106 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 unmodifi ed, suggesting that Malebranche still held to this view.

107 OC X 152; emphasis added.108 OC I 9–10, SAT XIX.109 OC XVI 105.110 OC XVI 111–112; 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.

111 See Chapter 5.112 Gary Hatfi eld, “Attention in Early Scientifi c Psychology,” in Visual Attention, ed.

Richard D. Wright (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998): 3–25, p. 7.

132 Notes

113 Many thanks to the following people for comments on various drafts of this chapter: Stephen T. Davis, Lisa Downing, Sean Greenberg, Gary Hatfi eld, 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 author’s own.

Chapter 5

1 For a chronological analysis of Malebranche’s account of human freedom, see Tad Schmaltz, “Human Freedom and Divine Creation in Malebranche, Des-cartes and the Cartesians,” British Journal of the History of Philosophy, Vol. 2, No. 2 (1994): 35–50. 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. 3–4 (1996): 321–331; and David Scott, “Malebranche on the Soul’s Power,” Studia Leibnitiana, Band XXVIII/1 (1996): 37–57. 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): 182–200.

2 In choosing the term “immanent,” Malebranche is drawing on a medieval dis-tinction between transeunt and immanent causation that would have been familiar to him from Suarez’s Metaphysical Disputations, a work he attacked in Elucidation 15 of the Search. See Francisco Suarez, On Effi cient Causality: Meta-physical Disputations 17, 18, 19, trans. Alfred J. Freddoso (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994): 131–177. See discussion in fi nal section of this chapter.

3 See, e.g., Timothy O’Connor, “Agent Causation,” in Agents, Causes & Events: Essays on Indeterminism and Free Will, ed. Timothy O’Connor (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995): 173–200; 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).

4 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 Malebranche’s various complaints that it is as long-winded as its title.

5 See OC III 31, SAT 554–555. 6 OC XVI 4, 41, 46. All translations from OC XVI are the author’s. 7 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), 777–780.

8 OC XVI 5–6, 17, 38, 47–48. 9 OC XVI 17. See also OC V 118–119, 121, TNG 170, 173 and OC VII 566.10 OC XVI 4, 31, 42, 46–47, 50.11 OC XVI 5, see also OC V 120, TNG 172.12 OC I 49, SAT 7.13 OC I 49–50, SAT 7–8.

Notes 133

14 OC I 52, SAT 8. See also OC XI 22–24, OC XII 191.15 OC I 53, LO 9.16 OC I 54–55, SAT 10. Malebranche does admit that in matters of contingent

truth, such as history, local custom, or grammar, we have to be satisfi ed 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 free-dom when we withhold our consent until the voice of reason tells us to give it. See also OCM 1:55–58, SAT 10–12, OCM XI 76–77, 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): 43–62.

17 OC I 55, SAT 10.18 Ibid.19 See the fi rst Elucidation to The Search OC III 31, SAT 554. Several times in

On Physical Premotion, Malebranche specifi cally tells the reader to return to this earlier work for more discussion (see, e.g., OC XVI 6, 22, 24).

20 OC III 31, SAT 555.21 Dictionnaire de Théologie 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.

22 DC 40.23 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): 1195–1278, 1200–1206. Henceforth Sleigh et al.

24 DC 40.25 OC XVI 7; emphasis added.26 OC XVI 8.27 See, e.g., OC XVI 28 and 39.28 I say infamous because these kinds of naturalistic analogies between the realms

of nature and grace infuriated Malebranche’s critics, who thought he was allow-ing 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 Riley’s informative introduction to his translation of The Treatise on Nature and Grace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992): 1–103, esp. 27–29.

29 OC V 50–51; Nicolas Malebranche, Treatise on Nature and Grace, trans. Patrick Riley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992): 129–130. Henceforth TNG.

30 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 merit—the Pelagian heresy. “But since all men are enveloped in original sin, and they are by their nature infi nitely beneath God, it is only Jesus Christ who, by the dignity of

134 Notes

his person and the holiness of his sacrifi ce, 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 138–139. See also OC VII 415–416.

31 OC V 54, TNG 132.32 OC V 55, TNG 133.33 OC V 66, TNG 138.34 OC V 97, TNG 151.35 Thus I disagree with Sleigh’s 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 argu-ment 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.

36 OC XVI 9.37 OC XVI 10.38 Ibid.39 Ibid.40 OC XVI 11.41 OC V 97–98, TNG 152.42 OC I 407, SAT 212. See also OC III 39–40, SAT 559, OC X 146, 148, OC XII 289,

DM 227.43 OC I 440–441, SAT 232.44 Elmar J. Kremer, “Malebranche on Human Freedom,” in The Cambridge Compan-

ion to Malebranche, ed. Steven Nadler (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000): 190–219, p. 205.

45 OC XI; Nicolas Malebranche, Treatise on Ethics, trans. Craig Walton (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1992): 48. Henceforth TE.

46 OC V 99, TNG 153.47 OC XI 22, TE 48.48 OC XI 23, TE 49.49 OC XI 23–25, TE 49–50.50 OC XI 34, TE 57.51 OC V 102, TNG 155.52 OC XI 60, TE 75; emphasis added.53 OC XI 186, TE 163; emphasis added.54 See OC XI 59–69, TE 75–82.55 OC V 118, TNG 169.56 OC V 163, TNG 208.57 OC V 164, TNG 209; emphasis added.58 See OC V 118–119, TNG 170.59 OC XI 71, TE 84.60 OC XI 79, TE 89.61 See OC V 121, TNG 173. See also OC VII 566–568.

Notes 135

62 OC V 122, TNG 174.63 OC V 124–126, TNG 176–177.64 OC V 129, TNG 180.65 OC V 130, TNG 180.66 See OC XVI 55–57.67 See OC 11: 41–42, TE vi–viii.68 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): 94–108; Kremer 2000; and Jean-Christophe Bardout, La vertu de la philosophie: Essai sur la moral de Malebranche (Hildesheim: G. Olms, 2000).

69 OC V 133, TNG 183.70 As Lévy-Bruhl glosses this, God’s “will, to be sure, makes us seek our own happi-

ness, but it does not make us seek it in the gratifi cation of the senses rather than in obedience to Himself.” Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, History of Modern Philosophy in France (New York: Burt Franklin/Lenox Hill Publishing, 1977 reprint): 73.

71 OC V 135, TNG 184.72 OC V 139, TNG 188; emphasis added.73 Ibid.74 Ibid.75 OC XVI 18.76 Ibid.77 Ibid., 35.78 Ibid., 50.79 Ibid., 46.80 Emphasis in the original; ibid., 46–47.81 Ibid., 47.82 Ibid.83 Ibid., 38.84 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 suffi ciently proven in the [fi rst 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., 22–23). 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 effi cacious 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.

85 See ibid., 6, 41–43.86 Ibid., 66.87 OC I 461, SAT 244.88 Emphasis added; OC XVI 29–30. See also OC III 31, SAT 554, and OC VII 568.89 See OC III 163–171, SAT 633–638, OC X 102–106.90 OC XVI 21.

136 Notes

91 See OC III 2, OC IX 981, OC X 61, and OC XVI 38.92 OC VI 163.93 OC XVI 20.94 Ibid., 85.95 Ibid., 87.96 Ibid., 94.97 Ibid., 98.98 Ibid., 99.99 Ibid., 101.

100 For further explanation, see Chapter 2.101 Emphasis in the original; ibid., 107.102 OC XII 69, DM 36.103 Suarez, 137 and 165.104 For an in-depth discussion of Suarez’s impact on Descartes, see Tad Schmatlz,

Descartes on Causation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008): 1–47.105 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): 74–118, p. 83.

106 OC II 315, SAT 449; emphasis added.107 OC II 315.108 OC III 225, SAT 669; emphasis added.109 See Roderick Chisholm, “Human Freedom and the Self,” in Free Will, ed. Robert

Kane (Malden: Blackwell Publishers, 2002): 46–59.110 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): 141–148.

111 OC I 10, SAT XXXIV. See also OC VI 137.112 My gratitude goes out to Sylvia Walsh for timely and thoughtful comments on

this chapter.

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No. 1 (1996): 37–57.——, “Malebranche’s Indirect Realism: A Critique of Steven Nadler,” British Journal

for the History of Philosophy, Vol. 4 (1996): 53–78.——, On Malebranche (Australia: Wadsworth-Thomason Learning, 2002).Sedgwick, Alexander, Jansenism in Seventeeth-Century France: Voices from the Wilderness

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347–369.Sleigh, Robert Jr., Chappell, Vere, and Della Rocca, Michael, “Determinism and

Human Freedom,” in The Cambridge Companion to the 17th Century, ed. Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (Oxford: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 1195–1278.

Tipton, Ian, “‘Ideas’ and Knowledge in Seventeenth-Century Philosophy,” Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 13 (1975): 145–166.

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Vienne, Jean Michel, “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): 94–108.

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——, “Foucher’s and de Mairan’s Critiques of Malebranche’s Beings of the Third Kind,” The Southern Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 34 (1996): 125–134.

Wilson, Margaret Dualer, “Descartes on Sense and Resemblance,” in Ideas and Mechanism: Essays on Early Modern Philosophy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999): 10–25.

Wippel, John F., The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas (Washington D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2000).

Yolton, John, “Representation and Realism: Some Refl ections on the Way of Ideas,” Mind, Vol. 96, No. 383 (July 1987): 318–330.

Aquinas, St. Thomas (Thomists) 80–1, 92, 95, 98, 107, 129

Aristotelian Scholastics (Peripatetics) 4, 13, 17, 67, 86, 115

Arnauld, Antoine 6, 11, 27, 38, 45–66, 70–1, 77, 95–6, 118–19.

attention 5, 10, 22, 47, 65–89 (especially 82–9)

Augustine, St. 2, 4, 12, 15, 61, 64, 97–8, 107, 113

Berkeley, George 3Bérulle, Cardinal 1body

essence of 5, 8–9, 76Boursier, Laurent 91–112, 106–7

Cartesian 1, 3, 17, 22–3, 46–7, 52–4, 67,70, 85

causeimmanent 91–112occasional 4–5, 9, 12real/true/transeunt 4–6, 111

consent 5, 92–9continuous creation, doctrine of 1, 9, 16,

33, 39, 43

Descartes, René 1, 11, 17–18, 24, 26, 47–8, 50, 63, 67, 72, 105, 107

and free creation of eternaltruths 27–8, 107

error 84avoidance of 93sensory 12–13sin 36, 93, 96, 102–3, 106

freedom 2, 11, 22, 82–9, 90–112

general law 6–8, 10, 38–40, 45, 96–7general vs. particular volitions 7, 24,

32–45, 96–7

Index

God, qua infi nitely perfect being 2, 5–6, 15–19, 25–6, 29–30, 44, 57, 79, 101

qua Divine Reason/Word 6, 21, 24–7, 29, 75

grace 36–7, 46–7, 96–7of enlightenment/creator 98–100, 103of feeling/Christ 97–8, 100, 134

Hobbes, Thomas 107Hume, David 3, 5

ideasdefi nition of 12–13Divine 55, 61, 65, 69–89effi cacious 12, 20, 68–89innate 14–16, 48

Imagio Dei doctrine 2, 87–8, 91, 105, 111intelligibility 11–12, 56–7, 71–2intelligible extension 9–10, 19–21, 56, 60,

63, 79

knowledgeby idea vs. sentiment 63, 105–6of soul vs. of body 63–4, 105–6

laws of motion 5, 7, 10Leibniz, Gottfried 3, 31, 38, 42, 117–18,

118–19Locke, John 3, 107love

natural vs. free 102–3of union vs. of esteem 102–3

mind/body union 8–10, 77modifi cation 59, 69–70, 105moral vs. physical 92, 95, 94, 103–12

necessary connection 4–6, 111

objective being 50–4, 57–8occasionalism, doctrine of 1–10, 56omnipotence/divine will 5–9, 30, 74–5

144 Index

Oratory 1order 24–32, 34–5, 45, 57, 99–100, 106–7

participation in divine ideas 30, 79–81Paul, St. 11, 44perception

intellectual 17–21, 50, 68–7, 82–9sensory 10–22, 56, 69–78, 82–9

physical premotion 90–8, 133

Régis, Pierre Sylvain 71, 80relations of magnitude vs. relations of

perfection 25–6, 99

Suarez, Francisco 108, 136substance 69–70, 105

theodicy/problem of evil 7–8, 24, 36–7, 96–7

understanding, faculty of 10, 92

vision in God, doctrine of 2, 10–22, 25–6, 55–66

will, faculty of 10, 84, 92–3

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