 One recent commentator has tried to make sense of Malebranche’s talk of intelligible parts, in a way that preserves God’s simplicity and avoids the dangers of pantheism, by conceiving intelligible extension as a set of “point-like entities” that correspond to material extension. Jasper Reid stresses that the former are not real points and that the relation between them is not one of actual distance. Indeed, he maintains that these intelligible points are points only in relation to the intellect that conceives intelligible extension in a partial manner. One virtue of this interpretation, he argues, is that it establishes an isomorphism or identity of structure between intelligible extension and the corporeal world without making the former materially extended (2003, 600). Reid’s view is motivated in part by the conviction that Malebranche conceived representation in terms of resemblance. Intelligible extension can represent the material world only if it resembles it in some way. He sees Malebranche’s talk of intelligible parts as gesturing at the aforementioned structural resemblance. Reid’s view is very ingenious but it suffers from philosophical and textual shortcomings. Although one other commentator (Watson 1966) has argued that Malebranche conceived representation in terms of resemblance, the textual basis for such a claim is rather dubious (see Nadler 1992, 46f). More fatally, Reid’s view requires that one conceive of material extension as consisting of a system of extensionless points, but, like other mathematical objects, points are abstractions or idealizations that do not exist in nature. As Malebranche notes in the Search, “Nature is not abstract: the levers and balls of mechanics are not the lines and circles of mathematics” (OC 2:277; LO 428). In short, Reid’s view works only if one idealizes material extension, something Malebranche refuses to do.