 Let’s begin with an objection that may have already occurred to the reader. Malebranche claims that the idea of the infinite cannot be a modification of our mind, for our mind is finite; it can only reside in God, the sole infinite being. But anyone familiar with Descartes’ causal argument for God’s existence, from the Third Meditation, knows that he argued otherwise. We have an innate idea of an actually infinite being that has been implanted in us by God himself. How, as finite beings, can we contain such an idea? To answer this question, Descartes drew an important distinction between two aspects of an idea – its so-called ‘formal’ being and its ‘objective,’ or representational, being. Formal being is the kind of being or reality that ideas have in virtue of being modes or modifications of one’s mind. As such, they all have the same degree of finite reality. Whether I am thinking of the sun, my own mind, or an infinite substance, my ideas in this case are all finite, formally speaking. However, insofar as they represent different things to my mind, my ideas have different degrees of what he calls ‘objective reality,’ exploiting a notion prevalent among scholastic philosophers. The idea of myself as a thinking thing, for example, has a finite degree of objective reality, while the idea of God has an infinite degree of such reality. The level of objective reality of an idea is determined by the level of reality that the object it represents has formally. So Descartes thought that as a finite being, my ideas must all have a finite degree of formal reality, but they can have varying degrees of objective reality all the way up to the infinite level. He would thus reject Malebranche’s claim that insofar as my ideas represent something infinite, they must reside in God.