which everyone focused. Around this were arrayed the occasionalists (Male-
branche and others), giving primacy to the spiritual side; at the other extreme
the sensualists, giving primacy to material extension, most notably in Locke’s
version; a third major alternative was Spinoza’s monism; a fourth was Leibniz’s
monadology, which combines mind and matter in each of an infinity of distinct
substances. A fifth position, aloof from this array of positive systems, com-
prised the skeptics, rejecting all. If we add to this the Cartesian loyalists, we
have six positions, more or less the upper limit under the law of small numbers,
the set of positions that can acquire attention at the same time. In fact there
were even more philosophies grappling for attention, and some were bound to
be squeezed out of the memory of subsequent generations. The 36 years from
1674 to 1710 contained one of the biggest and most colorful outbursts of
metaphysical systems since the early 1300s; the only other burst like it is the
variety of German Idealisms produced between 1780 and 1820. Berkeley was
part of the same generation of structural creativity (his chronological age is
irrelevant, and his youthful creativity is explained by the network links afford-
ing him the opportunity to take advantage of the structural transformation of
the intellectual field). Berkeley’s idealism is thus a seventh position on the
continuum, outflanking Malebranche on the spiritual side. It is probably for
this reason that Berkeley ended up occupying the reputational slot on that side
of the field, becoming one of the classic philosophers while Malebranche’s
reputation faded.^7
Malebranche accepted dualism but shifted the primacy back toward the
religious side. This was a natural enough combination of ingredients for a
young priest out of the Sorbonne. As a member of the liberal Oratorians,
around 1668–1674 he frequented the Cartesians, who lent him Descartes’s
unpublished manuscripts. He seized on the major point of controversy, the
difficulty of a causal connection between mind and body, and in 1674 proposed
an occasionalist solution. Evidently the link does exist. Malebranche took this
as evidence for the continuous intervention of God in the world; when a human
spirit wills, it is God who moves his or her body; going in the other direction,
perception depends on God’s transmitting the motion of matter into the ideas
humans experience. Malebranche defended the relevance of God in a time
when secular intellectual life was spinning free. Malebranche was not the only
religious thinker who hit on the occasionalist route out of Descartes. Geulincx,
who studied at Louvain with a Cartesian professor before converting to Cal-
vinism, developed an occasionalist account of causality, denying the substan-
tiality of created particulars; this was published only posthumously in 1688,
after Malebranche had reaped the fame. Others in the Parisian network of
religious thinkers found this slot as well; Cordemoy (who was associated with
Bossuet as reader to the Dauphin) and La Forge also gave an occasionalist
solution to the mind-body problem.588 • (^) Intellectual Communities: Western Paths