## 1. Life and Works



Malebranche was born in Paris on August 6, 1638, one month prior to
Louis XIV, and died, also in Paris, on October 13, 1715, six weeks
after the great French monarch. Malebranche was one of many children
born to his mother, Catherine de Lauzon, the sister of a Viceroy of
Canada, and his father, also Nicolas Malebranche, a secretary to Louis
XIII. As in the case of Descartes and Pascal, Malebranche was born in
frail health. His particular affliction was a severe malformation of
the spine, and due to this condition as well as his weak lungs he
needed to be tutored at home until the age of sixteen. Subsequently he
was a student at the College de la Marche, and after graduating
he went to study theology at the Sorbonne. His education left him with
a distaste for a scholasticism that focused on the work of Aristotle.
Thus, in 1660 he decided to leave the universities and to enter the
Oratory, a religious congregation founded in 1611 by the Augustinian
theologian Pierre Berulle (1575-1629). At the Oratory in
Paris, Malebranche studied ecclesiastical history, linguistics, and
the Bible, and with his fellow students also immersed himself in the
work of Augustine. He was ordained a priest on September 14, 1664.



There is the story that in the same year in which he was ordained,
Malebranche happened in a Paris bookstall upon a posthumous edition of
Descartes's *Traite de l'homme*
(*Treatise on Man*) which provides a sketch of a mechanistic
account of the physiology of the human body. Malebranche's early
biographer, Father Yves Andre, reported that he was so
"ecstatic" on reading this account that he experienced
"such violent palpitations of the heart that he was obliged to
leave his book at frequent intervals, and to interrupt his reading of
it in order to breathe more easily" (Andre 1886,
11-12). While Andre does not indicate why Malebranche was
so moved, one can speculate that he had discovered in this text a way
to investigate the natural world without relying on a stagnant
Aristotelian scholasticism. In any case, after his encounter with
*L'homme* Malebranche devoted himself to a decade-long
study of the Cartesian method and its results in mathematics and
natural philosophy.



The fruit of this study is a two-volume work bearing the title, *De
la recherche de la verite. Ou l'on traitte
de la nature de l'esprit de l'homme, et de l'usage
qu'il en doit faire pour eviter l'erreur dans les
sciences* (*Search after Truth. In which is treated the nature
of the human mind and the use that must be made of it to avoid error
in the sciences* ) (1674-75). It is primarily this text
which provides the basis for Malebranche's reputation in the
modern period. As its full title indicates, the *Recherche*
focuses on the principal sources of human error and on the method for
avoiding those errors and for finding the truth. The first five books
enumerate the various errors deriving from the senses, imagination,
pure understanding, inclinations and passions, respectively, and a
sixth book is devoted to the Cartesian method of avoiding such errors
through attention to clear and distinct ideas. The centerpiece of the
third book, on pure understanding, is a defense of the claim that the
ideas through which we perceive bodies exist in God. Tucked away in
the final book, on method, is a critique of "the most dangerous
error of the ancients," namely, the Aristotelian position that
there are secondary causes in nature distinct from God.



The first volume of the *Recherche*, containing the first three
books, drew an immediate response in 1675 from the abbe Simon
Foucher (1644-1696), canon of Sainte Chapelle of Dijon. Foucher
was an "academic skeptic" who attacked the assumption that
ideas in us can represent objects distinct from us (see Foucher 1675).
The Cartesian Benedictine Robert Desgabets (1610-1678) replied
to Foucher by insisting that the Cartesian rule that clear and
distinct ideas are true presupposes that our thoughts correspond to
real external objects. In brief prefaces added to the second volume of
the *Recherche*, Malebranche chastised both thinkers for
failing to read the work they were discussing, noting in particular
that he had explicitly argued in the *Recherche* that the ideas
we perceive exist in God rather than in us.



Malebranche solicited written responses to the *Recherche*
modeled on the sets of objections published with Descartes's
*Meditations*. Perhaps put off by Malebranche's harsh
treatment of Foucher and Desgabets, his critics offered instead only
informal objections channeled through mutual friends. In 1678,
Malebranche appended to the *Recherche* a set of sixteen
*Eclaircissements*, or clarifications, that respond to these
objections. Among the more important objections addressed are those
that concern Malebranche's assertion that we have a freedom to
"consent" to certain motives for action
("Eclaircissement I"), his claim that reason provides no
conclusive demonstration of the existence of the material world
("Eclaircissement VI"), his doctrine of the vision of
ideas in God ("Eclaircissement X"), his conclusion that we
know our own soul through a confused consciousness rather than through
a clear idea of its nature ("Eclaircissement XI"), and his
occasionalist thesis that God is the only true cause
("Eclaircissement XV"). The final 1712 edition includes
the addition of a seventeenth Eclaircissement that defends the
importance "not only for knowledge of nature but also for
knowledge of religion and morals" of the view, only hinted at in
the initial edition of the *Recherche*, that God acts for the
most part through "general volitions" (*volontez
generales*) and acts though "particular
volitions" (*volontez particulieres*) only in the
exceptional case of miracles.



Malebranche developed this last point in his 1680 *Traite de
la nature et de la grace* (*Treatise on Nature and
Grace*). He published this work over the objections of the
Jansenist theologian and Cartesian philosopher Antoine Arnauld
(1612-1694), who was disturbed by what he saw as
Malebranche's denial of the assertion in the Scriptures and the
tradition of God's attention to particular details in matters of
grace. Arnauld responded to the publication of *Nature et
grace* by engaging in open combat, and the ensuing battle
became one of the major intellectual events of the day. His opening
salvo was the 1683 *Des vraies et des fausses idees*
(*On True and False Ideas*), which attacks not *Nature et
grace* but rather the *Recherche* (see Arnauld 1683).
Arnauld's strategy here was to undermine Malebranche's
influence in theological matters by revealing the inadequacy of his
philosophical views. In particular, he attacked Malebranche's
assumption that ideas are "representative beings" distinct
from our perceptions, offering instead the position, which he
plausibly ascribed to Descartes, that ideas are simply a feature of
the perceptual modifications of our soul. This argument reflects a
sympathy for Descartes' views that dates back to Arnauld's
set of comments on the *Meditations*.



The same year that Arnauld presented his initial critique, Malebranche
published the *Meditations chretiennes et
metaphysiques* (*Christian and Metaphysical
Meditations*), in which "the Word" (i.e., the Second
Person of the Trinity) offers a summary of his system that highlights
the central role that God plays in both metaphysics and morality. This
work was in some ways a follow up to his *Conversations
chretiennes* (*Christian Conversations*), published
in 1677. In that earlier text, Malebranche presented a defense of the
Christian religion that emphasizes the Augustinian theme of our
dependence on God for knowledge and happiness. In 1684, Malebranche
further developed his views on moral theory in the *Traite
de morale* (*Treatise on Ethics*), in which he argued that
moral virtue requires a love of the "immutable order" that
God reveals to those who seek to know it.



In 1684, Malebranche also responded to Arnauld's
*Idees*, and after a further exchange on the topic of
the nature of ideas the debate turned to the theological issues
concerning divine providence, grace and miracles. The battle became
increasingly bitter, and as a result of a campaign on the part of
Arnauld and his supporters, Malebranche's *Nature et
grace* was put on the Catholic *Index librorum
prohibitorum* (*Index of Prohibited Books*) in 1690 (the
*Recherche* was added in 1709). The Malebranche-Arnauld polemic
continued even after Arnauld's death in 1694, with the
publication in 1704 of Malebranche's responses to earlier
letters from Arnauld.



In 1688, Malebranche published his *Entretiens sur la
metaphysique et la religion* (*Dialogues on Metaphysics
and Religion*), a concise summary of his main metaphysical
doctrines of the vision in God and occasionalism that also addresses
the problem of evil. In 1696, he appended to this text the
*Entretiens sur la mort* (*Dialogues on Death*), which
he composed after a life-threatening illness.



In 1692, Malebranche published a short study, the *Lois de la
communication des mouvements* (*Laws of the Communication of
Motions*), in which he endorsed Descartes's law of the
conservation of the quantity of motion but offered rules governing
collision that, unlike Descartes's own rules, involve no appeal
to a force in bodies to remain at rest. In correspondence with
Malebranche, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716) emphasized
difficulties with Descartes's conservation law, and that
correspondence led Malebranche to insert into a 1700 edition of the
*Lois* the admission that experience reveals that such a law
does not hold.



In 1693, Malebranche responded to the criticisms of the
*Recherche* in the 1690 *Systeme de philosophie*
(*System of Philosophy*) of the French Cartesian Pierre-Sylvain
Regis (1632-1707). Regis had defended an account
of ideas similar to the one that Arnauld had defended against
Malebranche during the 1680s, and Arnauld used the
Regis-Malebranche exchange as an occasion to return to the
issue of ideas during the last year of his life. Despite their
dispute, Malebranche and Regis were both appointed as honorary
members of the Paris Academie des sciences when it was
reorganized in 1699. Malebranche presented an inaugural lecture to the
Academie that defends against Descartes an account of color in
terms of the frequency of vibrations of light. In later published
versions of the lecture, Malebranche revised his discussion to take
into account the theory of the nature of color in the work of Sir
Isaac Newton.



In 1697, Malebranche published the *Traite de l'amour
de Dieu* (*Treatise on the Love of God*) with *Trois
lettres a Lamy* (*Three Letters to Lamy*), in which
he rejected the claim in the Benedictine Francois Lamy
(1636-1711) that the *Traite de morale* supports
the "quietist" position that moral action derives from a
disinterested "pure love of God." This rejection of
Lamy's quietism provided the basis for Malebranche's
reconciliation with the famous French cleric, Jacques-Benigne
Bossuet (1627-1704). Bossuet had earlier enlisted the aid of
Francois de Fenelon (1651-1715) in writing against
Malebranche's occasionalism and his appeals to God's
"general will," but later became a bitter enemy of
Fenelon's quietism.



With the support of the apostolic vicar in China, Malebranche
published in 1708 an *Entretien d'un philosophe
chretien et d'un philosophe chinois, sur
l'existence et la nature de Dieu* (*Dialogue between a
Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher on the Existence and
Nature of God*). A sixth and last edition of the
*Recherche* appeared in 1712, and in 1715 Malebranche published
his final work, *Reflexions sur la premotion
physique* (*Reflections on Physical Premotion*), in which
he responded to the claim of the abbe Laurent-Francois
Boursier (1679-1749) that occasionalism leads naturally to the
Thomistic position that God determines our action by means of a
"physical premotion." In his response, Malebranche
defended the claim, present from the first edition of the
*Recherche*, that our free action involves a
"consent" that God does not determine.



The *OEuvres completes de Malebranche* [OC], which
consists of 20 volumes, is the standard critical edition of
Malebranche's writings. In France, Malebranche has always been a
major figure in the history of early modern philosophy, and there is
an extensive earlier literature on him from this country; see, for
instance, Gouhier (1926), Gueroult (1939), Gouhier (1948), Gueroult
(1955-59), Robinet (1955), Rodis-Lewis (1963), and Robinet
(1965). This is supplemented by the important discussion in
Alquie (1974), and there is a continuation of substantive
French scholarship on Malebranche in works such as Moreau (1999),
Bardout (1999), Bardout (2000), and Pellegrin (2006). Despite the
relative neglect of him in the corresponding Anglophone literature
during the earlier part of the twentieth century, Malebranche has
become increasingly popular among English-language scholars more
recently. This change is indicated by the presence of recent English
translations of his writings; see Malebranche [DM], [DC], [TE], [DMR],
and [ST]. More recent book-length studies of Malebranche in English
include McCracken (1983), Jolley (1990), Nadler (1992), Schmaltz
(1996), Nadler (2000), Pyle (2003), and Peppers-Bates (2009), which
add to earlier trail-blazing studies such as Walton (1972) and Radner
(1978). Easton, Lennon and Sebba (1991) is a comprehensive
bibliography of work on Malebranche in various languages. This work
supersedes the bibliography in volume 20 of Malebranche [OC], which
had superseded Sebba (1959).


## 2. Ideas and the Vision in God



In a section of the third book of the *Recherche* devoted to
"the nature of ideas," Malebranche argues for his famous
doctrine of the vision in God. More precisely, the thesis in this
section is that we see external objects by means of ideas in God. The
argument for this thesis begins with the claim at the beginning of
this section that "everyone agrees that we do not perceive
objects external to us by themselves" since it can hardly be the
case that "the soul should leave the body to stroll about the
heavens to see the objects present there" (Malebranche [OC],
1:413). Arnauld later took exception to this starting point,
countering that "ideas, taken in the sense of representative
beings, distinct from perceptions, are not needed by our soul in order
to see bodies" (Arnauld 1683, 18). His main objection is that
Malebranche stacked the deck in favor of his doctrine that we see
ideas of bodies in God by assuming from the start that these ideas are
distinct from our own perceptions.



In developing his own position, Arnauld appeals to Descartes'
distinction in "Meditation III" between the formal reality
of an idea as a perceptual modification of mind and its objective
reality as something that represents an object. Arnauld insists that a
representative idea is simply the objective reality of a perception,
and thus not something distinct from that perception. However, it is
important to note that Malebranche's definition of an idea does
not rule out such a position from the start. As he himself insists to
Arnauld, the claim that we must perceive external objects through
ideas leaves open the question of whether an idea is "*a
modality of the soul*, according to the opinion of M. Arnauld; an
*express species*, according to certain philosophers, or an
*entity created with the soul*, according to others; or finally
*intelligible extension rendered sensible by color or light,*
according to my opinion" (Malebranche [OC], 6:95).



Malebranche's description of his own opinion goes beyond what
can be found in the original edition of the *Recherche*.
However, his description of the other alternatives is drawn directly
from this text. In particular, Malebranche had argued there that there
are only four alternatives to the conclusion that we see bodies
through ideas in God: (1) Bodies transmit resembling species to the
soul; (2) Our soul has the power to produce ideas when triggered by
non-resembling bodily impression; (3) Ideas are created with the soul
or produced in it successively by God; and (4) Our soul sees both the
essence and the existence of bodies by considering its own
perfections. Malebranche told Arnauld that since this list constitutes
"an exact division ... of all the ways in which we can see
objects" and since each of the alternative accounts yields
"manifest contradictions," his argument from elimination
serves to demonstrate the doctrine of the vision in God (Malebranche
[OC], 6:198-99).



It is difficult to determine from the *Recherche* the precise
source of the enumeration. However, Connell (1967) has established
that Malebranche's argument was drawn from the account of
angelic knowledge in the work of the Spanish scholastic, Francisco
Suarez (1548-1617). Particularly crucial for
Malebranche's enumeration is Suarez's claim that
angels must know material objects through species that God adds to
their mind given that God alone can know them through His own
substance. In light of this claim, we can take Malebranche's
first three hypotheses to cover the various ways in which we could
perceive bodies through immaterial species "superadded" to
our soul, and his fourth hypothesis to cover the possibility that we
perceive bodies in the perfections of our own soul. In arguing against
the last hypothesis, Malebranche notes that since a finite being can
see in itself neither the infinite nor an infinite number of beings
(as Suarez had argued in the case of angels), and since we in
fact perceive both the infinite and infinity in external objects, it
must be that we see these objects by means of perfections contained in
the only being that can possess an infinity of ideas, namely, God
Himself.



Malebranche takes the conclusion here to confirm the view in "an
infinity of passages" in Augustine that "we see God"
in knowing eternal truths. This appeal to the Augustinian theory of
divine illumination provides the basis for an argument for the vision
in God that bypasses the unusual enumeration in the
*Recherche*. This more direct argument is introduced in
"Eclaircissement X," where Malebranche urges that the
ideas we perceive must exist in an "immutable and necessary
Reason" since they are themselves immutable and necessary
(Malebranche [OC], 3:129f). Malebranche emphasizes that the
Augustinian view that eternal truths derive from uncreated features of
the divine intellect conflicts directly with the voluntarist
conclusion in Descartes that these truths derive rather from
God's free and indifferent will. Particularly in his exchanges
with Arnauld, Malebranche attempts to present his doctrine of the
vision in God as a natural consequence of Descartes' account of
ideas. However, his Augustinian argument serves to show that Descartes
himself could not have accepted this doctrine. Moreover, such an
argument reveals the most fundamental reason for Malebranche's
rejection of Arnauld's Cartesian identification of ideas with
our own perceptions. Since Malebranche identifies these ideas with
necessary and immutable essences, and since he holds that these ideas
derive their necessity and immutability from the divine intellect, he
concludes that Arnauld's position can only result in a radical
subjectivism that renders impossible any sort of a priori knowledge of
the material world.



"Eclaircissement X" also introduces the notion of
"intelligible extension" mentioned in Malebranche's
claim to Arnauld quoted above concerning his own opinion. According to
this Eclaircissement, God has a single ideal extension that serves to
represent particular bodies to Him. Arnauld objects that this position
involves a retraction of the claim in the *Recherche* that we
perceive bodies by means of distinct ideas in God. In response,
Malebranche insists that his view all along was that God represents
particular bodies by means of His own simple "absolute
being." For Arnauld, however, the view that God contains
extension in this way is objectionable since it is connected to the
heretical view in the work of the Dutch thinker Benedict Spinoza that
God is extended substance. The charge of Spinozism reappears in
Malebranche's 1713-14 correspondence with one of his
former students, J.J. Dortous de Mairan (1678-1771), who later
became the Secretary of the Academie des sciences. As in the
case of Arnauld, so in this correspondence Malebranche vigorously
denies this charge. In both cases, he responds by emphasizing that the
infinite and indivisible ideal extension that exists in God differs
from the finite and divisible extension in the material world. (For
more on Malebranche's notion of intelligible extension, see Reid
2003; cf. the different interpretation of this notion in Nolan
2012.)



A final feature of Malebranche's doctrine of the vision in God
is connected to the notion in his writings of the "efficacious
idea" (*idee efficace*). As first noted in Robinet
(1965), this notion became entrenched in Malebranche's system
around 1695, after his encounter with his Cartesian critic
Regis. In his *Systeme de philosophie*,
Regis had challenged the claim in the preface to the
*Recherche* that our mind is united to God in a manner that
"raises the mind above all things" and is the source of
"its life, its light, and its entire felicity"
(Malebranche [OC], 1:9). While he grants the commonplace claim that
God must create and conserve our soul, Regis denies that we are
enlightened by means of a union with ideas of bodies in God. Rather,
he insists that God conserves in us ideas that derive directly from
the bodies they represent. In the 1693 *Reponse a
Regis* (*Response to Regis*), Malebranche
emphasizes his Augustinian position that we can be instructed as to
the nature of bodies only through a union with God. However, he puts a
new spin on this position when he notes that the union with God
involves an "affecting" or "touching" of our
mind by God's idea of extension.



Already in the 1688 *Entretiens sur la metaphysique*,
Malebranche had suggested that the union with God can be explicated in
terms of a causal relation between God's ideas and our mind.
After 1695, he develops this suggestion by introducing the notion of
"pure" or non-sensory intellectual perceptions that are
produced by God's efficacious idea of extension. Yet he also
stresses in this later period that such an idea is the causal source
of our sensations. One advantage of this extension of the doctrine of
efficacious ideas to sensations is that it yields a fairly clear
explanation of Malebranche's claim to Arnauld that an idea is
"intelligible extension rendered sensible by color or
light." Prior to 1695, Malebranche explained how intelligible
extension is so rendered by appealing somewhat obscurely to the fact
that the soul "attaches" colors to a non-sensory idea.
However, the theory of efficacious ideas allowed him to say that this
idea is rendered sensible by causing in us the appropriate sensations
of color and light. The claim that we see ideas in God is thus
transformed into the claim that our soul has intellectual and sensory
perceptions that yield an understanding of the truth concerning bodies
in virtue of their causal relation to God's idea of extension.
Drawing on Robinet's results, one scholar has concluded that
while Malebranche started with the vision *in* God, he ended
with a vision *by* God (Alquie 1974, 209).


## 3. Cartesian Dualism



Malebranche tells Arnauld that it was Augustine's authority
"which has given me the desire to put forth *the new
philosophy of ideas*" (Malebranche [OC], 6:80). By contrast,
he emphasizes in the preface of the *Recherche* that Augustine
had failed to see that sensible qualities "are not clearly
contained in the idea we have of matter," adding that "the
difference between mind and body has been known with sufficient
clarity for only a few years" (Malebranche [OC], 1:20). The
allusion here is to Descartes's recent discovery of an idea of
matter that reveals that its nature consists in extension alone. This
idea dictates that sensible qualities such as colors, tastes and odors
that are not reducible to modes of extension cannot exist external to
mind. But since these qualities exist in the mind, and in particular
in the mind's perception of the qualities, the mind itself must
be distinguished from body. In this way the Cartesian idea of matter
reveals "the difference between mind and body."



In the initial book of the *Recherche*, on the senses,
Malebranche proposes that the erroneous belief in the Aristotelians as
well as in Augustine that sensible qualities exist in bodies has its
source in a misuse of "natural judgments" that help in the
conservation of the human body. Here he is following Descartes'
account in "Meditation VI" of the "teachings of
nature," and in particular the claim there that the purpose of
sensations is not to teach us about the nature of bodies but simply to
inform us of what is beneficial or harmful to the human composite.
Just as Descartes had urged that erroneous beliefs about the nature of
body can be avoided by attending to the clear and distinct perceptions
of the intellect, so Malebranche counseles that we avoid error by
attending to what the clear idea of matter reveals to us about the
nature of body. As we have seen, Malebranche has Augustinian reasons
for saying that the idea that so instructs us exists in God. By his
own admission, however, the conclusion that the idea that instructs us
is an idea of *extension* derives from the recent discoveries
of Descartes.



Malebranche emphasizes that the clear idea of extension must be
distinguished from our confused sensations. One point he wants to make
is that the idea exists in God while the sensations are only
modifications of our mind. However, his emphasis on the fact that this
idea is "pure" or non-sensory indicates that our
experience of the material world has an intellectual component. We
have seen that his late doctrine of the efficacious idea involved the
position that we have pure intellectual perceptions produced by
God's intellectual idea of extension. But his mature position
that this idea is also the cause of our sensations allows for the
claim that our most basic sensory contact with the material world has
an intellectual component.



We know that Malebranche's doctrine of the vision in God
conflicts with Descartes' doctrine of the creation of the
eternal truths. However, there are further departures from orthodox
Cartesianism that are linked to two qualifications of this doctrine.
The first qualification is that God's idea of extension can
reveal only the nature of bodies and not their existence. This
qualification is not explicit in the initial edition of the
*Recherche*, which says only that the existence of properties
of bodies external to us is "very difficult to prove"
(Malebranche [OC], 1:122). Foucher had objected that Malebranche has
no good reason to affirm the external existence of these properties.
In "Eclaircissement VI," Malebranche urges that the idea
of extension does reveal the possible existence of the material world,
and that Descartes has shown that we have a probable argument for its
actual existence deriving from our natural propensity to believe that
there are bodies. However, he concedes in this text--without
crediting Foucher--that neither he nor Descartes can provide an
argument from reason that demonstrates "with evidence" or
"with geometric rigor" that this belief is true. His
conclusion is that such an argument must appeal to faith in the
veracity of the report in the Scriptures that God has created the
heavens and the earth.



According to the second qualification of the vision in God--which
is found in the original edition of the *Recherche*--we
perceive the nature of our soul not through a clear idea in God, but
only through a confused "consciousness or inner sensation"
(*conscience ou sentiment interieur*). Malebranche
accepts the Cartesian commonplace that consciousness reveals
immediately the existence of the soul. He allows that we know the
nature of our soul to consist in thought, moreover, and he embraces
the Cartesian conclusion that the soul as a thinking thing is distinct
from body as an extended thing. Yet he insists that we know that the
soul is distinct from the body not by means of any direct insight into
the nature of thought, but rather by seeing that thought is not
contained in the idea of matter. More generally, Malebranche claims
that our lack of access to a clear idea of the soul is evident from
the fact that we do not have knowledge of thought that matches our
knowledge of the mathematical features of bodies. This last point
turns on its head Descartes' own conclusion in "Meditation
II" that the nature of the human mind is "better
known" than the nature of body; for Malebranche, it is the
nature of body that is better known than the nature of mind.



In "Eclaircissement XI," Malebranche attempts to counter
"the authority of Descartes" by arguing that the
Cartesians themselves must admit that they have only a confused
awareness of the nature of the sensory modifications of the soul. He
notes that while the intellectual idea allows the various modes of
extension to be related in a precise manner, there is no clear scale
on which we can order our sensations of different shades of the same
color, not to mention our sensations of sensible qualities of
different kinds. Malebranche takes the confusion in the sensations to
reveal a confusion in our perception of the nature of the soul. He
adds that Cartesians can discern that sensible qualities are
modifications of an immaterial soul only by seeing that they are
"not clearly contained in the idea we have of matter." For
a discussion sympathetic to Malebranche's critique of
Descartes's account of our knowledge of mind, see Schmaltz
(1996); for more recent discussions that defend Descartes against this
critique, see Nolan and Whipple (2005) and LoLorodo (2005).


## 4. Occasionalism



Malebranche is known for his occasionalism, that is, his doctrine that
God is the only causal agent, and that creatures merely provide the
"occasion" for divine action. On the old textbook account,
occasionalism was an *ad hoc* response to the purported problem
in Descartes of how substances as distinct in nature as mind and body
are can causally interact (see, for instance, Copleston 1958, 176, and
Keeling 1968, 224). According to this account, Malebranche was driven
by this problem with Cartesian dualism to propose that it is God who
brings it about that our sensations and volitions are correlated with
motions in our body.



However, occasionalism was already an old doctrine at the time that
Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) wrote against it. (There is a helpful
survey, in German, of the earlier history of occasionalism in Perler
and Rudolph 2000.) Thomas indicated that the primary concern of the
occasionalists was to strengthen the assertion of God's
omnipotence. Though he allowed that God must "concur" with
creatures in producing effects, Thomas also claimed that there is
reason to conclude that creatures are true secondary causes. For
instance, he urged that it is more in accord with divine greatness to
say that God communicates His power to creatures. Moreover, he claimed
that it is simply evident to the senses that creatures have the power
to bring about effects. Thomas also argued that if there were no
natures in creatures that explain effects, there could be no true
scientific explanation of effects through their natural causes.



Malebranche was concerned to respond to all of these arguments against
occasionalism, particularly as they were developed in the work of
scholastics such as Suarez. Against the first point that
God's greatness requires the communication of His power, he
countered that it is in fact idolatrous to attribute divine power to
creatures. Malebranche's argument that God alone can produce
effects relies on the assumption that "a true cause ... is
one such that the mind perceives a necessary connection [*liaison
necessaire*] between it and its effects" (Malebranche
[OC], 2:316). He claims that there is such a connection neither among
bodily states, nor between bodily and mental states, nor among mental
states. In all of these cases, one can deny the connections without
contradiction. There can be a necessary causal connection in only one
case, namely, the connection between the volitions of an omnipotent
agent and its upshots. Thus, only such an agent, namely, God, can be a
true cause. (For different interpretations of this argument, cf. Lee
2008 and Ott 2008).



In the *Entretiens sur la metaphysique*, Malebranche
offers a different argument based on Descartes's suggestion in
"Meditation III" that God conserves the world by
continuously creating it. The argument begins with the claim that God
must create bodies in some particular place and in determinate
relations of distance to other bodies. If God conserves a body by
creating it in the same place from moment to moment, that body remains
at rest, and if he conserves it by creating it in different places
from moment to moment, it is in motion. We cannot even create motion
in our own bodies. Rather, it is God who must produce it on the
occasion of volitional states. Moreover, it is not motions in our
brain that cause our sensory states, but God who produces them on the
occasion of the presence of such motions. Finally, I have indicated
the view in the *Entretiens* that God produces our intellectual
states through the union of our mind with His "intelligible
extension." While the argument from the necessity of the causal
connection yields the result that only an omnipotent being can be a
cause, the argument here is that only that being which
creates/conserves the world can cause various bodily and mental
states. However, both arguments converge on the conclusion, which
Malebranche claims to find in Augustine, that all creatures depend
entirely on God. (For further discussion of Malebranche's
various arguments for occasionalism, see Lee 2007 and Lee 2008.)



The second scholastic argument against occasionalism appeals to the
purported fact that it is evident to the senses that creatures have
causal power. For Malebranche, however, this argument is no more
persuasive than the argument that bodies must have colors and tastes
since our senses tell us that they do. As indicated above, Malebranche
offers Cartesian grounds for thinking that the purpose of our
sensations is not to reveal the true nature of the material world, but
rather to indicate what is helpful or harmful to our body. Malebranche
held that our attribution of causal powers to bodies manifests in
particular an attachment to the body that is an effect of original
sin. Due to this attachment, we take objects in the material world to
be a cause of our happiness rather than God.



In "Eclaircissement XV," Malebranche responds to the
scholastic point that occasionalism renders scientific explanation
impossible by appealing to the fact that God is not an arbitrary
agent, but acts in accord with His wisdom. This wisdom dictates that
He act "almost always" by means of a "general and
efficacious will." Such a will produces effects that are
perfectly law-like. For instance, God acts by a general will in
producing changes in bodies in accord with the law of the
communication of motion. Malebranche did allow that God can produce
miracles by "particular volitions" that are not law-like.
However, he emphasizes that there are relatively few such volitions in
God. Thus, we can offer scientific explanations that appeal to the
laws of motion that reflect the nature of God's general
will.



The appeal to God's general will is relevant to a non-scholastic
objection to Malebranche's occasionalism from his contemporary
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). In his *Systeme
nouveau* (1695), Leibniz agrees with Malebranche that "in
metaphysical rigor" created substances cannot be said to
interact, but he rejects Malebranche's appeal to God to explain
this apparent interaction on the grounds that such an appeal invokes a
*Deus ex machina* and thus involves a "recourse to a
miracle" (Leibniz 1997, 17). In the entry on Rorarius in the
first edition of his *Dictionnaire historique et critique*
(1697), Pierre Bayle (1647-1706) protests on Malebranche's
behalf that since God produces the interactions between mind and body
"only according to general laws, in doing so he never acts
extraordinarily" (Leibniz 1997, 74). In a 1698 letter to Bayle,
Leibniz responds that the mere fact that Malebranche takes God to act
in nature according to general laws does not suffice to show that his
occasionalism does not involve an appeal to a perpetual miracle.
Leibniz explains that insofar as a miracle derives from
"something which exceeds the power of created things,"
anything that God produces directly without any causal contribution
from created natures counts as miraculous (Leibniz 1997, 82). 



A further objection to Malebranche's occasionalism from one of
his contemporaries is found in the work of Bernard le Bovier de
Fontenelle (1657-1757), the eventual perpetual secretary of the
Paris Academie des Sciences. In his 1686 *Doutes sur le
systeme physique des causes occasionelles*, Fontenelle
argues that Malebranche's mechanistic physics is incompatible
with his occasionalism. This is so because according to mechanism,
bodily collision necessitates change in motion. But then bodily
collision satisfies Malebranche's main requirement for being a
true cause insofar as it has a necessary connection to its effect;
thus the conflict with occasionalism. In his 1688 *Entretien sur la
metaphysique*, Malebranche offers the response that the
laws governing the bodily effects of collision derive from God's
will rather than from the nature of bodies (Malebranche [OC], 12:164).
For different assessments of this response to Fontenelle, cf. Downing
(2005) and Schmaltz (2008).



Malebranche was not the first Cartesian to endorse occasionalism.
There were followers of Descartes such as Louis de la Forge
(1632-1666) and Claude Clerselier (1614-1684) who stressed
that God must be the cause of the communication of motion in bodily
collisions given the passivity of Cartesian matter. Clerselier in
particular attempted to preserve some room for the action of finite
minds on bodies, but the Cartesian Geraud de Cordemoy
(1626-1684) went further in claiming that only God can cause
changes in the material world. However, none of these thinkers went as
far as Malebranche in arguing explicitly that God must produce all
real changes in nature. Moreover, Malebranche is distinctive in
providing an explanation of God's action that distinguishes His
general will from His particular volitions. For a recent discussion of
issues connected to Malebranche's notion of particular
volitions, see Walsh and Stencil (2016).


## 5. Theodicy



The presence of various evils in the world is problematic for anyone
who claims that this world was created by a God who has infinite
power, knowledge and goodness. However, the problem is particularly
acute for an occasionalist such as Malebranche who holds that God is
the only true cause of effects in nature. Malebranche offers a
theodicy that addresses the problem of evil by emphasizing that in the
"order of nature" God acts for the most part through His
general will. In *Nature et grace*, he starts by
admitting that God could have acted by particular volitions to prevent
natural evils such as malformed offspring (a fitting example given his
own malformed spine), and thus could have produced a more perfect
world than He actually did create. In correspondence with Leibniz,
Malebranche emphasizes this point in distinguishing his theodicy from
Leibniz's (see Schmaltz 2010). However, Malebranche also claims
that God could have created a more perfect world only by departing
from simple laws, thereby sacrificing the simplicity and uniformity of
action that is a supreme mark of His wisdom. God produces the natural
evils that follow from simple laws not because He wills those
particular effects, but because He wills a world that best reflects
His wisdom by possessing the most effects governed by the fewest
laws.



In his *Reflexions* on Malebranche's *Nature et
grace*, Arnauld objects to what he took to be the suggestion
in his target text that God has concern only for general features of
the world and does not will the details of His effects. For Arnauld,
divine providence requires that God intend all of the particularities
of the world He creates. In the recent Anglophone literature, there is
a debate over whether Arnauld's critique is based on a proper
interpretation of Malebranche. This debate was promoted by the claim
in Nadler (1993) that when Malebranche says that God acts by means of
general laws or volitions, he means only that God has volitions in
accord with general laws, and that his doctrine of God's
continual creation in the *Entretiens sur la
metaphysique* in fact requires distinct volitions for
distinct effects (cf. the development of this interpretation in Pessin
2001 and Stencil 2011). Other commentators have countered that Arnauld
was correct in thinking that Malebranche's claim in *Nature
et grace* that God acts by relatively few general volitions
involves a rejection of the position that He has volitions for each
particular effect. Some evidence for this view is provided by the fact
that Malebranche emphasizes that the laws themselves are
"efficacious," and that God employs relatively few
volitions in producing effects in the order of nature (see Black 1997,
Jolley 2002, and Schmaltz 2003).



Malebranche insists that God's general will is operative not
only in the order of nature, but also in the "order of
grace." However, he notes that the production of effects in the
latter order also involves human action that is free in the strong
sense of not being determined by anything external to the agent. His
appeal to this sort of freedom is in fact central to his solution to
the problem of moral evil, that is, the compatibility of sin with
God's goodness. According to Malebranche, God is not responsible
for sinful action since such action derives not from Him but from
sinful agents. Arnauld objects that this solution is "more
pelagian than anything in Pelagius," and that one must side with
Augustine, who declared Pelagianism a heresy. Malebranche responds
that he did not follow Pelagius in denying the importance of grace,
and that Augustine himself had emphasized our freedom in action.



Malebranche also holds that it is obvious by "inner
sensation" that we are genuinely free. However, there is some
question whether this introspective report is compatible with
Malebranche's occasionalist claim that God is the only real
cause. This question has generated considerable discussion in the
recent Anglophone literature (cf. Schmaltz 2005, Greenberg 2008 and
2015, and Peppers-Bates 2009). Malebranche does allow that God alone
is the cause of our inclination to love "the good in
general." However, he also insists that we are free to
"consent" to the stopping of that inclination at a
particular object other than God. Such consent results in an
"absolute and intrinsic" love of that object that is
sinful given that this love is worthy only of God. The consent is free
because one is always able to suspend consent and to search for
objects more worthy of our love.



There is the claim that Malebranche's account of consent
remained essentially the same over the course of his philosophical
career (see Kremer 2000, 206). However, there is some reason to think
that this account in fact was subject to significant development. In
the initial discussion of freedom in the *Recherche*, there is
the suggestion that consent consists in our
"determination" of our natural inclination toward the good
in general (Malebranche [OC], 1:46). However, this suggestion
conflicts with the claim in the very same text that it is God who
directs our natural inclination toward particular objects prior to any
free act on our part. Indeed, in his later discussion of freedom in
"Eclaircissement I," Malebranche held that our freedom
consists not in an active turning of our natural inclination, but
rather in the inactivity of our resting with a particular good
(Malebranche [OC], 3:548). This view is further developed in the
*Traite de morale*, which in the case of free action
distinguishes between the *force* involved in the search for
truth and the *liberte* that directs this search. Free
acts of consent fall under the latter, whereas the former involves the
dispositions of our free inclinations that God produces in us on the
occasion of these acts (Malebranche [OC], 11:70). In contrast to his
earlier suggestion that our free acts involve either a turning of our
natural inclination or an inactivity coupled with such an inclination,
Malebranche's view here is that such acts are inactivities
coupled with a distinct sort of free inclination. There are different
answers to the question of whether this account serves to reconcile
Malebranche's occasionalism with his claim that we have genuine
freedom of action; cf. Schmaltz (2005), which defends the coherence of
Malebranche's final position on this issue (in line with the
earlier view in Laporte 1951), and Greenberg (2015), which argues that
this position is not fully consistent.


## 6. Moral Theory



The theocentrism that is evident in Malebranche's doctrines of
the vision in God and occasionalism would lead us to expect that God
plays a central role in his moral theory. This expectation is borne
out by his discussion in the *Traite de morale*. Indeed,
Malebranche's two doctrines are present in that work. The vision
in God is reflected in the insistence there that moral duties are
dictated by "relations of perfection" revealed in
God's wisdom. As in the case of necessary truths concerning
body, so in the case of moral truths Malebranche unequivocally rejects
Cartesian voluntarism. The doctrine of occasionalism is reflected in
Malebranche's insistence that God is our greatest good since He
alone can cause our happiness. This point indicates that Malebranche
takes moral action to require a consideration not only of abstract
relations of perfection, but also the happiness of the self.



Malebranche starts from the Augustinian position that morality
concerns the proper ordering of our love. Given the importance of
human freedom for his theodicy, it is not surprising that Malebranche
insists that the love required for moral action involve the free
exercise of the will. His version of the "good will" is
one that freely strives to be guided in action by objective relations
of perfection that hold among the various objects of love. God is the
most perfect being, and hence the most worthy of our love, while human
beings are more perfect than mere material beings, and thus more
worthy of our love. When the intensity of our love matches the order
among perfections, we have a right love that provides the basis for
virtue, that is, a habitual inclination to love objects according to
their perfections.



Malebranche holds that due to original sin, we are inclined not to
right love directed by our perception of relations of perfection in
God's wisdom, but rather to a disordered love directed by bodily
pleasures deriving from the soul-body union. This is the counterpart
to the disordered inclination of our will to make judgments about the
nature of the material world that are based on sensations deriving
from the union. For Malebranche, a corrective to both of these
disorders of the will is to attend to clear ideas that exist in
God.



Malebranche sometimes suggested that disordered love of bodily
pleasure derives from self-love. Encouraged by this suggestion, one of
his followers, Francois Lamy, claimed that his position leads
to the quietist view in Fenelon that moral conduct
requires a "pure love of God" that involves no concern for
the self or its pleasure. This position, which Lamy himself endorsed,
was later condemned by the Catholic Church, due in large part to a
campaign against Fenelon directed by his critic,
Bossuet. But Malebranche insists that such a position directly
conflicts with his own view that pleasure itself is a good that is
required as a motive for action. When critics such as Arnauld and
Regis charge that this view results in hedonism, Malebranche
responds that it is only ordered pleasures that bring the greatest
good. This response is reflected in his claim to Lamy that a
disordered love of self is to be contrasted not with pure love of God,
but rather with an ordered love that seeks happiness in the
contemplation of the greatest good, God. In emphasizing the need for
this sort of love of God, Malebranche was returning to his view in the
preface to the *Recherche* that it is through a union with God
that the mind "receives its life, its light, and its entire
felicity." For more on Malebranche's engagement with
quietism, see Montcheuil (1947). But cf. the critical evaluation of
Montcheuil's decidedly pro-Malebranche view of this exchange
with Lamy in Dreyfus (1958), 318-22. There is a recent
discussion of the relation of Malebranche to quietism in Walsh and
Lennon (2012).



Bardout (2000), 111-62, includes the argument that
Malebranche's exchange with Lamy on pure love in fact marks a
transition in his thought from a "metaphysical morality"
that stresses the purely intelligible nature of our moral end, to a
"sensible morality" that stresses a conception of that end
in terms of the cause of our pleasure. However, this shift may not be
as dramatic as in the case of Malebranche's conception of
freedom. For the view that God is our sole good insofar as He is the
sole cause of our pleasure is present already in the first edition of
the *Recherche* (Malebranche [OC], 172-73). Even so,
there is reason to think that this view becomes increasingly important
to Malebranche's moral theory.