rits. 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
worthless objects to those which have value, and earthly to heavenly
pleasure? The soul is, on the one hand, united to God, on the other, united
to the body. The possibility of error and sin rests on its union with the
body, since with the ideas (as representations of the pure understanding)
are associated sensuous images, which mingle with and becloud them, and
passions with the inclinations (or the will of the soul, in so far as it is
pure spirit). This gives, however, merely the possibility of the i