Excepting some hints by Descartes, Malebranche was among the first dimly to anticipate Berkeley, in resolving our supposed power of seeing outness into an interpretation of visual signs which we learn by experience to understand. The most important part of Malebranche’s account of seeing is contained in the _Recherche de la Vérité_ (Liv. I. ch. 9), in one of those chapters in which he discusses the frequent fallaciousness of the senses, and in particular of our visual perceptions of extension. He accounts for their inevitable uncertainty by assigning them not to sense but to misinterpretation of what is seen. He also enumerates various visual signs of distance. That the _Recherche_ of Malebranche, published more than thirty years before the _Essay_, was familiar to Berkeley before the publication of his _New Theory_, is proved by internal evidence, and by his juvenile _Commonplace Book_. I am not able to discover signs of a similar connexion between the _New Theory_ and the chapter on the mystery of sensation in Glanvill’s _Scepsis Scientifica_ (ch. 5), published some years before the _Recherche_ of Malebranche, where Glanvill refers to “a secret deduction,” through which—from motions, &c., of which we are immediately percipient—we “spell out” figures, distances, magnitudes, and colours, which have no resemblance to them. An approach to the _New Theory_ is found in a passage which first appeared in the second edition of Locke’s _Essay_, published in 1694, to which Berkeley refers in his own _Essay_ (sect. 132-35), and which, on account of its relative importance, I shall here transcribe at length:— “We are further to consider concerning Perception that the ideas we receive by sensation are often, in grown people, altered by the judgment, without our taking notice of it. When we set before our eyes a round globe of any uniform colour, e.g. gold, alabaster, or jet, it is certain that the idea thereby imprinted in our mind is of a flat circle, variously shadowed, with several degrees of light and brightness coming to our eyes. But, we having by use been accustomed to perceive what kind of appearance convex bodies are wont to make in us, what alterations are made in the reflection of light by the difference in the sensible figures of bodies—the judgment presently, by an habitual custom, alters the appearances into their causes; so that, from that which is truly variety of shadow or colour, collecting the figure, it makes it pass for a mark of figure, and frames to itself the perception of a convex figure and an uniform colour, when the idea we receive from them is only a plane variously coloured, as is evident in painting.