Midwest Studies in Philosophy, XXVI (2002)

“Presence” and “Likeness” in Arnauld’s

Critique of Malebranche
NANCY KENDRICK

T he debate between Malebranche and Arnauld concerning the nature of ideas

rests on a disagreement about whether representative ideas are modifications
of the mind, as they are for Arnauld, or entities distinct from the mind’s modifi-
cations, as they are for Malebranche. As Malebranche explains in The Search after
Truth, awareness of sensations, for example, does not require ideas, for “these
things are in the soul, or rather . . . they are but the soul itself existing in this or
that way.”1 Sensations are, for Malebranche, non-representative modifications of
the mind. When we feel pain, see color, or feel sad, these perceptions/sensations
do not represent anything external to the mind. Rather, they are modes of the
mind, “just as the actual roundness and motion of a body are but that body shaped
and moved in this or that way” (ST, 218). Ideas, which are in God, and which are
necessary for us to perceive external objects, represent the geometric properties
of external objects. These representative ideas are not modifications of the mind,
though they do stand in some relation to our minds.2 They are, in Malebranche’s
words, “intimately joined” to it.
In contrast, Arnauld holds that both sensations and representative ideas are
modifications of the mind.3 Indeed, ideas can have no other relation to a mind. In

1. Nicolas Malebranche, The Search after Truth, trans. by Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J.
Olscamp (Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 1980), 218. (This work is abbreviated as
“ST” hereafter.)
2. Nor are they modifications of God’s mind. See ST, 625.
3. In “Arnauld’s Alleged Representationalism,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 12
(1974), Monte Cook claims that “Arnauld admits that some modifications of the soul, namely sen-
sations, are non-representative” (54). Steven Nadler disagrees, arguing in Arnauld and the Carte-
sian Philosophy of Ideas (Manchester, England: Manchester University Press, 1989) that Arnauld
points out in the Fourth Set of Replies to Descartes’ Meditations that “sensations are clearly

205
206 Nancy Kendrick

short, ideas of external objects are, for Arnauld, essentially representative modal-
ities, while for Malebranche ideas of external objects are representative, but they
are not modalities. For this reason, Arnauld charges that Malebranche’s ideas are
“entities distinct from perception.”
Arnauld claims that Malebranche is deceived into positing these “ideas
distinct from perception” because he has “blindly accept[ed] . . . two principles . . . :
that the soul can perceive bodies only if they are present, and that bodies can only
be present to it through certain representative beings, called ideas or species, which
are similar to them and take their place, and which are intimately united in their
stead with the soul.”4 These principles of “presence” and “likeness” are, respec-
tively, the subject of Arnauld’s attack. I discuss these in order to show why Arnauld
believes that Malebranche’s “ideas distinct from perception” present an answer to
what is, in fact, a pseudo-problem.
One of Malebranche’s arguments for the necessity of an idea being “present”
to the mind occurs in Book III of The Search after Truth:

I think everyone agrees that we do not perceive objects external to us by

themselves. We see the sun, the stars, and an infinity of objects external to
us; and it is not likely that the soul should leave the body to stroll about the
heavens, as it were, in order to behold all these objects. Thus, it does not see
them by themselves, and our mind’s immediate object when it sees the sun,
for example, is not the sun, but something that is intimately joined to our
soul, and this is what I call an idea. Thus, by the word idea, I mean here
nothing other than the immediate object, or the object closest to the mind,
when it perceives something . . . It should be carefully noted that for the
mind to perceive an object, it is absolutely necessary for the idea of that
object to be actually present to it—and about this there can be no doubt.
(ST, 217)

One type of objection that Arnauld raises in On True and False Ideas to the
“presence” doctrine focuses on the fact that the way in which ideas are thought
to be present to the mind is based on an erroneous analogy with corporeal pres-
ence. Consequently, ideas are taken to be spatially or “locally” present to the mind.
Arnauld objects that this analogy fails, because, in fact, “the object must be absent
from [the eye], since it must be at a distance, and if it were in the eye or too close
to the eye, it could not be seen” (TFI, 16). Arnauld’s claim is true, but it does not
go very far in undermining the view that “present to the mind” is to be understood
as spatial or local presence. For if the spatial analogy is itself suspect, it is made
no less so by claiming that things need to be at a distance from the eye.
In a second consideration of Malebranche’s “strolling mind” argument noted
above, Arnauld focuses not on how ideas might be present to the mind, but rather

capable of representing, or presenting or displaying a positive content to the mind” (83). My point
is simply that representative ideas are modifications of mind for Arnauld. Whether sensations are
representative or not, they are also modifications of the mind.
4. Antoine Arnauld, On True and False Ideas, trans. by Elmar J. Kremer (Lewiston, NY: The
Edwin Mellen Press, 1990), 15. (This work is abbreviated as “TFI” hereafter.)
 Arnauld’s Critique of Malebranche 207

on Malebranche’s reasoning that it is precisely because external objects them-

selves are spatially distant from us, and thus not present to the mind, that some-
thing else must stand in for them that is present to the mind. Arnauld mockingly
describes Malebranche’s view in the following way: “In place of the sun, which
would not seem to leave its place so often (that would be too great a difficulty)
we have very cleverly discovered a certain representative being to take its place
and to make up for its absence by being intimately united to our souls. We have
given the name of idea or species to that being which is representative of the
sun . . .”(TFI, 36).
Arnauld claims that the principle “our soul cannot see or know or perceive
. . . objects distant from the place where it is, insofar as they remain distant” is “of
the utmost falsity” (TFI, 36), and that it is quite evident that “our soul can know
countless things distant from the place where it is” (TFI, 36). But when Arnauld
gives his evidence for this, he shifts the ground of the debate. He directs us to
Postulate 5 and Definition 9 of Chapter 5, both of which concern our knowledge
of the existence of the external world. The explanation he gives there is not how
we can see, know, or perceive objects at a distance, but how we can know that there
are any objects at all.
First, Arnauld claims that if the senses cannot assure us of the existence of
the external world, reason can. And if reason fails, faith can succeed. (Malebranche
agrees with the latter position.) He concludes “[c]onsequently . . . [since I] have
faith in addition to reason, it is very certain that when I see the earth, the sun, the
stars, and men who converse with me, I do not see imaginary bodies or men, but
works of God and true men whom God has created like me” (TFI, 23). Second,
he claims that although he has to reason to the idea of the sun, the stars, the earth,
etc., as existing, rather than having this certainty in the first awareness of each of
those ideas, “the idea which represents to me the earth, the sun and the stars as
truly existing outside my mind no less merits the name ‘idea’ than if I had it without
need of reasoning” (TFI, 21). What Arnauld has presented here is not an argu-
ment that “our soul can know countless things distant from the place where it is.”
Malebranche’s (alleged) position—that it is the spatial distance between objects
and a mind that necessitates an idea to make good the absence of the object—
may be false, but it is not equivalent to denying that we can know (by reason or
faith or in whatever way) that external objects exist. Either Arnauld has conflated
the skeptical problem with the problems generated by “ideas distinct from per-
ception,” or he thinks Malebranche has.
In any case, it is not entirely clear that Malebranche means the “strolling
mind” argument literally. In the Réponse, he says “[i]s it not clear that what I said
was more a kind of jest rather than a principle upon which I establish sentiments
which undermine this same principle?”5 Even Arnauld presents the motivation for

5. Quoted in Steven Nadler, Réponse de l’auteur De la Recherche de la Vérité au livre de

M. Arnauld des vrayes et des fausses idées, in Malebranche and Ideas (Oxford: Oxford Univer-
sity Press, 1992), 71. Nadler adds “I see no reason for not taking Malebranche at his word here,
when he denies that the kind of presence he intends as necessary for immediate perception . . . is
local.”
208 Nancy Kendrick

Malebranche’s representative ideas that stand in for objects spatially distant in

something of a jestful way: “But mockery aside, it is certain that our friend has
assumed . . . that our soul cannot see . . . objects distant from the place where it is”
(TFI, 36).
It would seem, then, that Malebranche does not mean for “presence”
to be taken in this simple sense of “locally” or spatially present, and, moreover,
that Arnauld is aware of that. Nonetheless, Arnauld does get the last word
here. For if spatial distance is not the issue giving rise to the need for ideas
distinct from perceptions, then the argument of the “strolling” passage comes to
nothing:

For, if he were now forced to agree that local presence or distance has
nothing to do with a body’s being able or not being able to be the object of
our mind, what he says about the distance of the sun and about the fact that
our soul does not leave our body to go look for it would be as unreasonable
as if, speaking to a low Breton who had addressed me in his language, which
I do not understand, I complained that I was not able to understand any-
thing that he had said to me, because he always spoke too softly. That would
be ridiculous since with regard to a language that I do not understand,
it is all the same to me whether someone speaks it to me softly or loudly.
(TFI, 39)

There is, however, a more subtle interpretation that Arnauld offers of

Malebranche’s position that presence is to be thought of as local or spatial pres-
ence. It will help to clarify Arnauld’s position here by looking to his discussion of
a position advanced by Gassendi, whose aim is to show, against Descartes, that the
soul is extended, and therefore material. Here is Gassendi’s argument:

Our soul has knowledge of bodies only through the ideas that represent
them. But those ideas could not represent extended things unless they were
material and extended themselves. Hence they are of that kind. But in order
to enable the soul to know bodies, they must be present to the soul, i.e., be
received in the soul. Therefore, the soul must be extended and consequently
corporeal. (TFI, 15)

Gassendi’s position has an important implication that bears on the Arnauld-

Malebranche debate. Arnauld and Malebranche agree with the first premise of
Gassendi’s argument, that is, we know bodies by means of ideas that represent
them. And at least on the surface, they both disagree with the second premise.
However, this premise presupposes that the relation between an idea and that
which the idea represents is isomorphic. And Arnauld alleges both that Male-
branche accepts this implication of the materialist premise, and that this accep-
tance leads him to advance presence as a criterion for knowledge of external
bodies. Although Malebranche “spiritualizes” Gassendi’s material ideas, he does
accept the third premise of Gassendi’s argument: Ideas must be present to the
mind.
 Arnauld’s Critique of Malebranche 209

The point about isomorphism is made clearer in the following objection

Arnauld raises against Malebranche:

If the object of understanding had to meet the condition of being locally

present to our soul in order to be known, it would have to be the case that,
just as our will cannot love anything as bad, so our understanding could not
conceive anything as locally absent from our soul. But we cannot doubt that
our mind conceives countless things as absent from the place where our soul
is. When for example, the mother of the young Tobias cried so bitterly
because he had not yet returned, her mind certainly conceived of him as
absent from her. Thus, local presence is not a necessary condition of an
object’s being able to be seen by our soul, and consequently, local absence
contributes nothing to its not being able to be seen. (TFI, 39–40)

Arnauld is not saying that we can conceive of or perceive objects that are spatially
distant from the mind. That is, his concern here is not Malebranche’s (alleged) view
that the spatial distance of bodies from minds keeps us from perceiving them
directly.6 Rather, his point is that a conception can be present to the mind that rep-
resents the absence of the object conceived. In other words, Arnauld sees Male-
branche as unable to account for the fact that we can conceive of something as
absent. Arnauld’s objection is this: if conceiving something as present requires the
spatial presence of a representative entity, then it would be impos-sible to con-
ceive something as absent, since that would require the spatial absence of a rep-
resentative entity.
Furthermore, Arnauld sees this position leading to the acceptance of
the third premise of Gassendi’s argument as well: if these representative
entities, understood either as material or mental—are to assist the mind, they
must be present to it or received in it. And once they are present to the mind,
they must be perceived by it. In yet another objection to Malebranche, Arnauld
says:

I assume that my soul is not thinking of any bodies, but that it is occupied
with the thought of itself . . . The question is how it can pass from that
thought to the thought of body A. You claim that it can see body A only
through a certain being representative of it. But I ask you whether it will
suffice that the representative being . . . be intimately united to my soul,
unless a new modification is brought about in my soul, i.e., unless it receives

6. John Laird sees the passage above precisely as a response to Malebranche’s (supposed)
commitment to the view that the spatial distance of an object (in this case the young Tobias) pro-
hibits our knowing it. He says: “[i]f the mind, [Malebranche] says, saw the sun and the stars par
eux-memes it would have to sally forth and take a walk among them. This is local contact with a
vengeance and Arnauld, having to refute a dogma so fantastically put, twists the knife round and
round from a variety of angles. His point is that the local absence of things has nothing to do with
the possibility of knowing them.A mother may surely weep for her absent child . . .”“The ‘Legend’
of Arnauld’s Realism,” Mind XXXIII (1924), 12. However, as I show, Arnauld is not objecting
that, according to Malebranche, the mother’s mind is not where young Tobias is.
210 Nancy Kendrick

a new perception. Obviously not, for that representative being can be of no

use unless the soul perceives it. (TFI, 45)

Here, Arnauld is pointing out the trouble he has with Malebranche’s view that rep-
resentative ideas are not modifications of the mind. Malebranche’s representative
entities cannot do any work unless the mind perceives them.
The treatment of “present to the mind” as spatial or local presence may show
that Malebranche’s position is muddled, but it does not show that his “ideas
distinct from perception” are irrelevant, unnecessary, or superfluous. Yet Arnauld
claims they are. It is this line of Arnauld’s argument to which I now turn.
A second way of understanding Malebranche’s claim that bodies cannot be
present to or intimately joined to the mind points to the ontological distinction
between the material and the mental. Malebranche clearly regards the fact that
body is extended and mind unextended as what prohibits bodies from being
present to the mind, and it is precisely this ontological gulf that makes it impos-
sible for bodies to be known by the mind directly—that is, without ideas distinct
from perception.

But as for things outside the soul, we can perceive them only by means of
ideas, given that these things cannot be intimately joined to the soul . . .
[H]ere I am speaking mainly about material things, which certainly cannot
be joined to our soul in the way necessary for us to perceive them, because
with them extended and the soul unextended, there is no relation between
them. (ST, 218–9)

Material things, in virtue of their materiality, cannot be intimately joined to the

soul. Thus, if they are to be known, something else must both stand in for them
and be of the proper ontological sort. Ideas, it would seem, fit the profile.7
Now, Arnauld does not reject Malebranche’s dualism: the extended and
material is ontologically distinct from the unextended and mental. But he does
reject Malebranche’s view that the ontological gulf between mind and body entails
an epistemological gulf. As Arnauld says, “[I]t is the most badly founded fantasy
in the world to propose that a body qua body is not an object proportioned to the
soul in the way it must be to be known by it” (TFI, 46). It is one thing to say that
mind and body are too different to causally interact.8 But it is quite another, at
least as Arnauld sees it, to say that mind and body are too different for the latter
to be known by the former.
Arnauld sees quite clearly that what prevents Malebranche from holding
that the soul can know external bodies in precisely the way it knows itself—i.e.,

7. Nadler notes that Malebranche has some trouble here; it is not clear what sort of relation
these ideas can have to a mind, since they are not modifications of it. “If ideas are not mental, if
they are neither minds nor modifications of mind, then in what sense are they the right ontologi-
cal type for ‘intimate union’ with the mind?” Malebranche and Ideas, 75.
8. This is a standard Cartesian view, though Descartes casts some doubt on it when he claims
that it is a “false supposition . . . that if the soul and the body are two substances whose nature is
different, this prevents them from being able to act on each other” (CSM II, 275).
 Arnauld’s Critique of Malebranche 211

directly, without the need for representative entities distinct from the mind’s
modifications or perceptions—“is that bodies are too coarse and too dispropor-
tionate to the spirituality of the soul to be able to be seen immediately” (TFI, 46).
The “disproportionate” distance between minds and bodies here is ontological, not
spatial. But Arnauld denies that the ontological “distance” entails that the mate-
rial cannot be known by the mind. His view is that to be knowable is “an insepa-
rable property of being, just as much as being one, being true, and being good, or
rather it is the same as being true, since whatever is true is the object of the under-
standing . . .” (TFI, 46). Intelligible being is, for Arnauld, a certain manner of being.
This is made quite explicit in his use of Descartes’ concept of objective existence.

What is called being objectively in the mind, is not only being the object, at
which my thought terminates, but it is being in my mind intelligibly, in the
specific way in which objects are in the mind. The idea of the sun is the sun,
insofar as it is in my mind, not formally as it is in the sky, but objectively, i.e.,
in the way that objects are in our thought, which is a way of being much
more imperfect than that by which the sun is really existent, but which
nevertheless we cannot say is nothing . . . (TFI, 21)

Thus, like Descartes, Arnauld contends that “the same thing can exist in two ways;
formally insofar as it is a real (mind-independent) existent; and objectively insofar
as it is thought of.”9 The sun existing objectively is a way of being, and it is a
distinct way of being from the sun existing formally. That is, the sun’s objective
existence is is distinct manner of being from the sun’s formal existence.
Arnauld agrees with Malebranche, then, that the mental and the material
are ontologically distinct, but he denies that the result of this is that the latter
cannot be known directly—that is, without ideas distinct from perception—by the
former. For Arnauld, Malebranche’s insistence that the material cannot be known
directly by the mental is equivalent to saying that material being cannot be known
by mental being. And as Arnauld sees it, this is to make intelligibility, or “being
known,” another, in fact, a superfluous relation between the mental and the
material, requiring a superfluous entity, viz., ideas.
When Arnauld considers Malebranche’s second principle—that the “like-
ness” or similarity representations bear to objects permits them to stand in for the
objects and be present to the mind—he argues that likeness can be understood
only as likeness between ontological types:

When it is said that our ideas and our perceptions . . . represent to us the
things that we conceive, and are the images of them, it is in an entirely dif-
ferent sense than when we say that pictures represent their originals and are
images of them, or that words . . . are images of our thoughts. With regard to
ideas, it means that the things that we conceive are objectively in our mind
and in our thought. But this way of being objectively in the mind, is so

9. Thomas M. Lennon, “Philosophical Commentary,” in The Search after Truth, 799.

212 Nancy Kendrick

peculiar to mind and to thought, being what . . . constitutes their nature, that
we would look in vain for anything similar in the realm of what is not mind
and thought. As I have already remarked, what confuses this entire matter
of ideas is that people want to use comparisons with corporeal things to
explain the way in which objects are represented by our ideas, even though
there can be no true relation here between bodies and minds. (TFI, 20)

Arnauld is again insisting that the same thing can exist in two ways: formally or
mind-independently,10 and objectively, or mind-dependently. The sun existing
objectively is a manner of being, and it is a distinct manner of being from the sun
existing formally. Furthermore, the sun existing objectively is a kind of existence
specific to the mind, so that one could not find anything similar to this outside the
mind. Something else may be found outside the mind, viz., the sun existing for-
mally, but that’s not like the way the sun exists objectively.11 Similarly, the way the
sun exists formally (i.e., as a material object) is a kind of existence specific to mate-
rial objects, so that one could not find anything similar to this “inside” the mind.
Arnauld is denying that ideas can bear a likeness to extended objects on the
grounds that ideas and extended objects are ontologically distinct. Malebranche
also subscribes to this view, but he takes it to entail that minds cannot know bodies
directly, that is, without ideas distinct from perception. It is in drawing this erro-
neous conclusion that Arnauld thinks Malebranche has created a problem where
there is none. For if ontological dualism commits one at least to the view that some
being is mental and some being is material, then the question, How does the intel-
ligible kind of being know the material kind of being? is senseless. On Arnauld’s
interpretation, this question (Malebranche’s question) cannot arise. The problem
it alleges is, in short, a pseudo-problem. Thus, any answer Malebranche gives to it,
that is, any entities he might propose as necessary to explain the additional “being
known by” relation, would be irrelevant. For Arnauld, “ideas taken in the sense of
representative beings, distinct from perceptions, are not needed by our soul in
order to see bodies” (TFI, 18). And this is because there is no further knowledge
relation to be explained.12

10. Formal existence is mind-independent existence, but it is not merely mind-independent

existence. The sun existing formally is not the sun existing merely mind-independently, but exist-
ing mind-independently in the specific way in which extended objects exist, viz., materially.
11. Berkeley would later object to this “double existence” theory, but he would approve of
the claim that one seeks in vain to find a “likeness” of ideas external to the mind. This is, indeed,
Berkeley’s “likeness principle,” and it becomes the basis for his attack on materialism. See
Berkeley’s Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge, especially sections 8 and 90.
12. I thank Tim Griffin for his helpful comments on an earlier draft of this paper.