 When my body is injured, I subsequently feel pain. This pain, according to Malebranche, is due to the “general and efficacious law of the union of soul and body” that God has established, and, thus, this injury is the occasional cause of the pain I feel. Occasional causes, as noted earlier, are just those events of a certain type on the occurrence of which God wills to be bring about an instance of distinct, yet commonly conjoined, event type, such that these two types of events are naturally correlated with robust regularity. In fact, on the occasionalist scheme almost every event that occurs in our world will turn out to be both an occasional cause and effect in that it will be part of the vast network of regularities that we observe. That is, any given effect that follows from an occasional cause will, in turn, most likely be the occasional cause for the following, subsequent effect. Thus, even on the occasionalist picture, there are hardly any events that fail to be part of this network of causal regularities, and such regularity is possible because the overwhelming majority of events in the world are guided by God’s general volitions, which are determined by general laws that have been established by God. Note that this last qualification—that the general laws themselves are established by God—marks a critical difference between an occasionalist like Malebranche and an Aristotelian essentialist about creaturely causal powers. For the latter holds that certain effects follow necessarily from the creature’s causal essence, while Malebranche rejects such causal essences and denies any such necessary connection that holds directly between a creaturely cause and  effect.[36]