he infinite, just as God does not
derive his being from the creatures, but all the creatures are imperfect
participations of the divine Being."[17] Again, he tells us, in the same
chapter, that "when we wish to think of any particular thing, we first
cast our view upon all being, and then apply it to the consideration of
the object in question. We could not desire to see any particular object
unless we saw it already in a confused and general way, and as there is
nothing which we cannot desire to see, so all objects must be in a
manner present to our spirit." Or, as he puts it in another place, "our
mind would not be capable of representing to itself the general ideas of
genera and species if it did not see all things as contained in one; for
every creature being an individual we cannot say that we are
apprehending any created thing when we think the general idea of a
triangle."

Relation of the Divine mind to human knowledge.

The main idea that is expressed in all these different ways is simply
this, that to determine any individual object as such, we must relate
it to, and distinguish it from, the whole of which it is a part; and
that, therefore, thought could never apprehend anything if it did not
bring with itself the idea of the intelligible world as a unity.
Descartes had already expressed this truth in his _Meditations_, but
he had deprived it of its full significance by making a distinction
between the being and the idea of God, the former of which, in his
view, was only the cause of the latter. Malebranche detects this
error, and denies that there is any idea of the infinite, which is a
somewhat crude way of saying that there is no division between the
idea of the infinite and its reality. What Reid asserted of the
external world, that it is not represented by an idea in our minds,
but is actually present to them, Malebranche asserted of God. No
individual thing, he tells us--and an idea is but an individual
thing--could represent the infinite. On the contrary, all individual
things are represented through the infinite Being, who contains them
all in his substance "tres efficace, et par consequence tres
intelligible."[18] We know God by himself, material things only by
their ideas in God, for they are "unintelligible in themselves, and we
can see them only in the being who contains them in an intelligible
manner." And thus, unless we in some way "saw God, we s