  Echoing Descartes in part VI of the Discourse on Method, Le Grand held that God implanted certain simple, true, and immutable ideas in our minds so that we could have a science of nature; yet, He also created a nature whose power is so ample and vast that only observation can close the gap between the two. Thus, while Le Grand remains essentially a rationalist in his claim that knowledge of immutable essences, laws and truths remains the autonomous domain of reason, which is independent of the appearances of the senses, it is a rationalism tempered by his view that truths and laws are dependent on the will of God, and hence, are in some sense contingent. This dependence means that truth must be sought after in the effects of nature, and not in something independent of those effects, and that secondary causes, although dependent both on God’s will and on the primary truths of nature, have a genuine role in causal explanation. In other words, our search for truth is in the specific operations of things, and even though our understanding of these truths is importantly independent of these specific operations, our discovery of them is not.