The Search after Truth

The main work of the French Oratorian priest Nicolas Malebranche, who combined Descartes's philosophy with Augustine's theology. It is a study of the causes of human error and of the method for avoiding them, in six books following the faculties of the mind: the senses, the imagination, the pure understanding, the natural inclinations, the passions, and finally method. The senses, he argues, are given to us to preserve the body, not to reveal the truth about things. Book III contains his best-known doctrine, the vision in God: we do not see material things through ideas in our own minds but through the ideas in God, in whom all things are represented. Book VI states his occasionalism, the view that God is the only true cause and that created things, including minds and bodies, are only the occasions on which God acts. The Elucidations, added in 1678, answer objections and develop these themes further.

It is the fullest statement of occasionalism and the vision in God, ideas that left their mark on Berkeley's account of ideas and Hume's account of causation and still bear on debates about perception and causal power.