 The appeal to God’s general will is relevant to a non-scholastic objection to Malebranche’s occasionalism from his contemporary Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646–1716). In his Système nouveau (1695), Leibniz agrees with Malebranche that “in metaphysical rigor” created substances cannot be said to interact, but he rejects Malebranche’s appeal to God to explain this apparent interaction on the grounds that such an appeal invokes a Deus ex machina and thus involves a “recourse to a miracle” (Leibniz 1997, 17). In the entry on Rorarius in the first edition of his Dictionnaire historique et critique (1697), Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) protests on Malebranche’s behalf that since God produces the interactions between mind and body “only according to general laws, in doing so he never acts extraordinarily” (Leibniz 1997, 74). In a 1698 letter to Bayle, Leibniz responds that the mere fact that Malebranche takes God to act in nature according to general laws does not suffice to show that his occasionalism does not involve an appeal to a perpetual miracle. Leibniz explains that insofar as a miracle derives from “something which exceeds the power of created things,” anything that God produces directly without any causal contribution from created natures counts as miraculous (Leibniz 1997, 82). 