 Malebranche emphasizes that the clear idea of extension must be distinguished from our confused sensations. One point he wants to make is that the idea exists in God while the sensations are only modifications of our mind. However, his emphasis on the fact that this idea is “pure” or non-sensory indicates that our experience of the material world has an intellectual component. We have seen that his late doctrine of the efficacious idea involved the position that we have pure intellectual perceptions produced by God’s intellectual idea of extension. But his mature position that this idea is also the cause of our sensations allows for the claim that our most basic sensory contact with the material world has an intellectual component.