Later Malebranche

This chapter looks at two of Malebranche’s later innovations. I argue that the first (imbuing ideas with causal power) is of no help in explaining perception, for a causal connection is insufficiently fine-grained. The doctrine of intelligible extension exacerbates these problems, since it is uniform; any differences among its ‘regions’ is due to the activity of human minds. The chapter shows that Malebranche’s later work, in his exchanges with Arnauld and Régis, departs from the entire Cartesian picture. Malebranche’s subject does not use an idea to think about the world of extension, for the simple reason that intelligible extension is not a Cartesian idea and plays none of the roles the Cartesians assign to it. Intelligible extension is not a representation; it is not ‘of’ anything. The chapter concludes by arguing that Malebranche’s ‘flattening’ of ideas influenced George Berkeley, who also denies that the immediate objects of experience are representations.