But how is the unextended soul capable of cognizing extended body?  Only through the medium of ideas.  The ideas occupy an intermediate position between objects, whose archetypes they are, and representations in the soul, whose causes they are.  The ideas, after the pattern of which God has created things, and the relations among them (necessary truths), are eternal, hence uncaused; they constitute the wisdom of God and are not dependent on his will.  Things are in God in archetypal form, and are cognized through these their archetypes in God.  Ideas are not produced by bodies, by the emission of sensuous images,[1] nor are they originated by the soul, or possessed by it as an innate possession.  But God is the cause of knowledge, although he neither imparts ideas to the soul in creation nor produces them in it on every separate occasion.  The ideas or perfections of things are in God and are beheld by spirits, who likewise dwell in God as the universal reason.  As space is the place of bodies, so God is the place of spirits.  As bodies are modes of extension, so their ideas are modifications of the idea of extension or of “intelligible extension.”  The principle stated at the beginning, that things are perceived in God, is, therefore, supported in the following way:  we perceive bodies (through ideas, which ideas, and we ourselves, are) in God.

[Footnote 1:  Malebranche’s refutation of the emanation hypothesis of the Peripatetics is acute and still worthy of attention.  If bodies transmitted to the sense-organs forms like themselves, these copies, which would evidently be corporeal, must, by their departure, diminish the mass of the body from which they came away, and also, because of their impenetrability, obstruct and interfere with one another, thus destroying the possibility of clear impressions.  A further point against the image theory is furnished by the increase in the size of an object, when approached.  And, above all, it can never be made conceivable how motion can be transformed into sensations or ideas.]

As the knowledge of truth has been found to consist in seeing things as God sees them, so morality consists in man’s loving things as God loves them, or, what amounts to the same thing, in loving them to that degree which is their due in view of their greater or less perfection.  If, in the last analysis, all cognition is knowledge of God, so all volition is loving God; there is implanted in every creature a direction toward the Creator.  God is not only the primordial, unlimited being, he is also the highest good, the final end of all striving.  As the ideas of things are imperfect participations in, or determinations of universal being, the absolute perfection of God, so the particular desires, directed toward individual objects, are limitations of the universal will toward the good.  How does it happen that the human will, so variously mistaking its fundamental direction toward God, attaches itself to perishable goods, and prefers