A translation of a passage from Malebranche's Réponse au Livre des vraye et des fausses Idées (1684). It's a bit rough and needs tweaking, but it's a start. The passage may be found at OC 6:57 (Réponse chapter VI, sections IV and V).
"Mr. Arnaud does not deny that the mind has the idea of infinity, for he avows it page 314. He must therefore claim that the modalities of the soul are essentially representative of the infinite. But I have two things to say to him.
"The first, that all modality is the being itself in some fashion. The roundness, for example, of a body is nothing but the body itself figured in such-and-such fashion, that all the parts of the surface are equally distanced from the which one calls the center. And so, the modality of the soul is not able to represent objects, save only the fashion of being, i.e., the perception it has of the object: that perception, I claim that it makes it felt without idea, I claim that it is essentially representative, by interior sentiment, of what it contains. But I deny taht it is able to represent by idea, or to make known what it does not contain.
"The soul does not know itself by an idea that it is able to contemplate, in order to discover the properties of which it is capable, as do the Geometers who contemplate the idea they have of extension, and discover relations in it: it does not know its own being, other than by interior sentiment of what it has in itself. The soul is not able, therefore, to know its modifications, but only to feel them. For as the modifications are not other than the substances themselves in such-and-such fashion, the perception one has of modifications is of the same kind as that which one has of substances. I have an idea of extension: I therefore have an idea of circle. I have only an interior and confused sentiment of my being: therefore I have also have an interior and confused sentiment of my own perceptions, which are not other than modifications of my substance. So, rather than modalities of the soul being able to be representative of objects, so as to make them clearly known, and so that one may learn, for example, like Geometers the certain truths of their science, they do not make themselves known. This is what I already said in the Search after truth, in so many words."
