 Malebranche’s philosophy has aptly been described as “Hume, but with Christian faith” in the sense that like Hume he offers a massive skeptical critique of the capacity for humans to produce certain knowledge as a result of the epistemological inadequacy of their senses and higher cognitive faculties, but unlike him Malebranche nevertheless offers a path forward toward such knowledge through a Cartesian understanding of divine reason as accessible to humans through the proper practice of mathematical reasoning. In brief, to reason like god is to reason like an advanced mathematician, especially one trained in the new analytical mathematics of the period, and to the extent that this kind of reasoning is adaptable to human language itself, it allows for human thinking to connect with the divine order of things through a proper practice of rigorous cognitive and linguistic discipline. Anchoring this understanding for Malebranche was a Christian faith in a rationally created cosmos accessible to the human mind, and while later Malebranchians followed Hume in discarding this Christian foundation, many nevertheless absorbed Malebranche’s lessons regarding the power of a properly constituted language (his model was advanced analytical mathematics) to serve as a bridge connecting limited humans with the infinitude of being. Diderot’s partner D’Alembert represented the explicitly mathematical strand of this tradition of thinking, but Diderot embodied another strand, more attentive to language in all its variety as the link joining finite human understanding with the infinite complexities of nature. Although Diderot was suspicious of D’Alembert’s Malebranchian conception of mathematics as the foundational model for all of science, his own interests in the empirical natural sciences were still rooted in the same preoccupation with how nature represents itself and is represented by humans in scientific work. He was especially attentive to the crucial role that language plays in rendering experiential phenomena suitable for human knowledge, and if he was critical of the over-emphasis upon mathematics as the supreme model for a fully rigorous scientific language, he was nevertheless Malebranchian in treating the relation between experiential phenomena, linguistic description, and human knowledge in all its variety as the epistemological zone that mattered most.