 Given his theory of divine archetypes for creation, Malebranche must allow that there is an idea of the mind in God, but he does not think God gives us access to this idea. We lack, therefore, what Descartes would call a clear and distinct idea of the mind. And since ideas for Malebranche are the essences or natures of things, he denies that we have knowledge of the mind’s essence. To be sure, he endorses Descartes’ cogito, or the claim that one knows one’s own existence. But here Malebranche distinguishes two kinds of knowledge (connoître) – knowledge through ideas as afforded by Vision in God and knowledge through consciousness – the latter being inferior. I have knowledge through consciousness of the existence of my mind and its modifications, which is just to say that I know them by an inner awareness (sentiment intérieur) that attends all of my thoughts, beliefs, sensations, passions, etc. But this awareness is limited to their bare existence and fails to reveal their underlying nature. Indeed, although sensations and other such modifications of the mind are typically strong and lively in their affects, they are ‘confused modalities … full of darkness’ (Dialogue 3, OC 12:65; JS 33). Malebranche’s negative view of knowledge of the mind is the natural complement to his theory of Vision in God. Following Augustine, Malebranche often stresses that the human mind is not a light unto itself, and that God (or what he sometimes calls ‘universal Reason’) is the only true light, that is, the only source of truth and knowledge: ‘Man is not a light unto himself. His substance, far from enlightening him, is itself unintelligible to him. He knows nothing except by the light of universal Reason which enlightens all minds, by the intelligible ideas which it discloses to them in its entirely luminous substance’ (Dialogue 3, OC 12:64; JS 32). The human mind is so utterly devoid of cognitive resources, and thus so completely dependent on God, that it cannot even know its own nature (for Malebranche on self-knowledge, see Jolley 2000, Nolan and Whipple 2005, and Schmaltz 1996).