 With the help of the commonly accepted Scholastic assumption that any real being must either be a substance or mode, Malebranche presents a rather clever argument that active powers have no place in bodies (see Clatterbaugh 1999, 114–5). One might wonder what would be so bad with the first option—that is, that of granting the existence of a separate, distinct substance in bodies responsible for the bodies’ activity. But Malebranche’s response is clear: even if we bracket the worry of whether we could have a sufficiently clear idea of what kind of thing this substance would be, it is unlikely that this substance would be a Cartesian extended substance. For it would possess modes or properties other than relations of distance. And in discussing why the second option is going to fail, we see the explicit statement that, though an active power perhaps could be a mode of some other substance, it is not a mode that belongs to bodies, since forces or powers are not relations of  distance.[15]