 Berlin was further nudged towards pluralism by discovering what he saw as a suggestion by Nicolas Malebranche that simplicity and goodness are incompatible (1680, e.g. 116–17, 128–30); this struck him at the time as an ‘odd interesting view!’, but it stuck, and he became convinced of its central and pregnant truth (2004,  72).[17]  Berlin set out his basic account of what he would later label monism in his biography of Marx (1939, 37), but did not explicitly criticise it or set out a pluralistic alternative to it, although his lecture ‘Utilitarianism’ (1937b), dating from the late 1930s, does include an argument that anticipates his later claim that values are incommensurable. The basic crux of pluralism, and Berlin’s connection of it to liberalism, is apparent in rough, telegraphic form in Berlin’s notes for his lecture ‘Democracy, Communism and the Individual’ (1949), and pluralism is also advanced in an aside, though not under that name, in ‘Historical Inevitability’ (1954: see 2000b, 151). Berlin referred to pluralism and monism as basic, conflicting attitudes to life in 1955 (Berlin et al. 1955, 504). But his use of the term and his explication of the concept did not fully come together, it appears, until Two Concepts of Liberty (1958; even then, his articulation of pluralism is incomplete in the first draft of the essay).