 Here Berkeley seems to be arguing that the proper understanding of how God relates to bodies and their motion would naturally lead us to conclude that all bodies are causally passive. The passive nature of bodies in this argument does not depend on their status as collections of ideas, but rather follows from the fact that the cause of the existence of bodies is identical to the cause of the motion and rest of bodies, namely, God. In the background appears to be the widely held theological principle that “conservation is but continuous creation”, which, as we shall see, was most forcefully presented by Malebranche.