Editing Nicolas Malebranche (section)

===Occasionalism===
In general, [[occasionalism]] is the view that there are no efficient causes in the full sense other than God. Created things are at best "occasions" for divine activity. Bodies and minds act neither on themselves nor on each other; God alone brings about all the [[phenomena]] of nature and the mind. Changes occurring in created things will exhibit regularities (and will thus satisfy a [[Humeanism#Causality and necessity|Humean]] definition of causation) because God in creating the world observes what Malebranche calls "order": he binds himself to act according to laws of nature chosen in accordance with his general will that the world be as good as possible, and thus (for example) that the laws be simple and few in number.

In particular, there will be laws governing what we would customarily call the "interaction" of body and mind, so that similar movements in the body will "occasion" similar ideas in the mind. That relation has some features of the causal relation (it satisfies, for example, universal conditionals of the form "Whenever ''C'' occurs, ''E'' occurs"). But in reality both the idea in the mind and the movement in the body are caused by God.