 A final feature of Malebranche’s doctrine of the vision in God is connected to the notion in his writings of the “efficacious idea” (idée efficace). As first noted in Robinet (1965), this notion became entrenched in Malebranche’s system around 1695, after his encounter with his Cartesian critic Régis. In his Systême de philosophie, Régis had challenged the claim in the preface to the Recherche that our mind is united to God in a manner that “raises the mind above all things” and is the source of “its life, its light, and its entire felicity” (Malebranche [OC], 1:9). While he grants the commonplace claim that God must create and conserve our soul, Régis denies that we are enlightened by means of a union with ideas of bodies in God. Rather, he insists that God conserves in us ideas that derive directly from the bodies they represent. In the 1693 Réponse à Régis (Response to Régis), Malebranche emphasizes his Augustinian position that we can be instructed as to the nature of bodies only through a union with God. However, he puts a new spin on this position when he notes that the union with God involves an “affecting” or “touching” of our mind by God’s idea of extension.