DESCARTES TO BERKELEY It is evident, for example, that there is no necessary connection between our will to move our arm and our arm’s movement.’ Sure, my arm moves when I will, but not because I will If it was really myself moving my arm, I would know how I it; but I cannot even explain how I wiggle my Wnger If I not move my arm, who does? God does, answers Malebranche God is the only true cause From all eternity he has willed all that is to happen and when it is to happen So he has willed the act of my will and the simultaneous movement of my arm My willing is not the cause, but only provides an occasion for God to the causing (For this reason, Malebranche’s system is called ‘occasionalism’.) Not only can minds not act on body; neither can bodies act on bodies If bodies collide and move away from each other, what really happens is that God wills each of them to be in the appropriate places at the appropriate moments ‘There is a contradiction in saying that one body can move another’ (EM 7, 10) If minds cannot act on bodies, and bodies cannot act on bodies, can bodies act on minds? Normally we imagine that our minds are constantly being fed information from the world via our senses Malebranche denies that our ideas come from the bodies they represent, or that they are created by ourselves They come directly from God, who alone is capable of acting causally on our intellects If I prick my Wnger with a needle, the pain does not come from the needle: it is directly caused by God (EM, 6) We see all things in God: God is the environment in which minds live, just as space is the environment in which bodies are located It was this teaching which particularly aroused the indignation of John Locke Many Christian thinkers, from St Augustine onwards, had held that human beings see the eternal truths and the moral laws by contemplating, in some manner, ideas in the mind of God In making this claim Malebranche could claim august authority But it was a novelty to say that our knowledge of changeable material objects depends on immediate divine illumination God, after all, is not himself material or changeable: all there is to be seen in God is the pure idea of intelligible extension How does contemplation of the eternal divine archetype of extension convey to us any knowledge of the contingent history of bodies moving and changing in the world about us? The answer that Malebranche gives is that in seeing the archetype of extension we are also made aware of all the laws of Cartesian physics that govern the behaviour of the material world If this is to be suYcient to 59