 In conceiving God as ‘being in general’ Malebranche borrows much from the thirteenth-century scholastic thinker St. Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas also conceives God as simple and indeterminate, and thinks it follows from this that we, with our finite minds, cannot fathom God’s essence, and so must know him through his effects. Malebranche qualifies this last point somewhat by saying that we know God through his possible (material) effects, that is, relative to what he can produce. Indeed, Malebranche holds that in God we see an infinity of possible worlds: