occasionalism, which was embraced by another contemporary, Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715). According to this, physical events do not strictly cause or bring about mental events at all. Rather, they provide the occasions upon which God himself inserts mental events of appropriate kinds into our biographies. Strictly speaking, our bodies do not affect our minds, but only provide occasions on which God does. Locke himself does not say this, but we might reflect that there is precious little difference between, on the one hand, God intervening at his good pleasure to make it that the dividing of
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