hould be able
to see nothing else." The vision _of_ God or _in_ God, therefore, is
an "intellectual intuition" in which seer and seen, knower and known,
are one. Our knowledge of things is our participation in God's
knowledge of them.

When we have gone so far with Malebranche, we are tempted to ask why
he does not follow out his thought to its natural conclusion. If the
idea of God is not separable from his existence, if it is through the
idea of him that all things are known, and through his existence that
all things are, then it would seem necessarily to follow that our
consciousness of God is but a part of God's consciousness of himself,
that our consciousness of self and other things is but God's
consciousness of them, and lastly, that there is no existence either
of ourselves or other things except in this consciousness. To
understand Malebranche is mainly to understand how he stopped short of
results that seemed to lie so directly in the line of his thought.

To begin with the last point, it is easy to see that Malebranche only
asserts unity of idea and reality in God, to deny it everywhere else,
which with him is equivalent to asserting it in general and denying it
in particular. To him, as to Descartes, the opposition between mind
and matter is absolute. Material things cannot come into our minds nor
can our minds go out of themselves "pour se promener dans les
cieux."[19] Hence they are in themselves absolutely unknown; they are
known only in God, in whom are their ideas, and as these ideas again
are quite distinct from the reality, they "might be presented to the
mind without anything existing." That they exist _out_ of God in
another manner than the intelligible manner of their existence _in_
God, is explained by a mere act of His will, that is, it is not
explained at all. Though we see all things in God, therefore, there is
no connexion between his existence and theirs. The "world is not a
necessary emanation of divinity; God is perfectly self-sufficient, and
the idea of the infinitely perfect Being can be conceived quite apart
from any other. The existence of the creatures is due to the free
decrees of God."[20] Malebranche, therefore, still treats of external
things as "things in themselves," which have an existence apart from
thought, even the divine thought, though it is only in and through the
divine thought they can be known by u