  Norris adopts the Malebranchean doctrine of Vision in God, which states that all intellectual and sensory perception is perception of God. Norris significantly augments neither Malebranche's account nor argument for Vision in God with respect to sensory perception.  Norris limits himself to reproducing Malebranche's eliminative argument from the Search after Truth for why our sensory perception must be of ideas in God. The eliminative argument is found in chapters VII through XI in Theory II. Yet Norris does offer a more detailed account of abstract thought (which is an intellectual perception of God) than does Malebranche. Norris meticulously conveys how we come to have knowledge of the essences of created things. God is revealed through degrees of being (i.e. divine ideas), such as the degrees of being exhibited by bodies and minds, and we can come to know their essences by attending carefully to our perceptions of divine ideas. Careful attention requires thinking abstractly for Norris, and Norris offers us a definition of abstraction: