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mind, or adjacent to such acts of the mind as apprehension.
 When we lay aside those analogies, and reflect attentively upon
our perception of the objects of sense, we must acknowledge, that,
though we are conscious of perceiving objects, we are altogether
ignorant how it is brought about: and know as little how we
perceive objects as how we were made (EIP II, xiv [302a]).
Having offered his diagnosis of what led his predecessors to
subscribe to their particular criteria for a satisfactory explanation
of perception and memory  in particular, what led them to sub-
scribe to the identity thesis  Reid goes on to offer what he regards
as counterexamples to the identity thesis. And there are plenty of
counterexamples; any act of introspective acquaintance will do.
The relation of one s dizziness to one s introspective acquain-
tance with the dizziness is surely not a causal relation, nor is the
relation of some belief one has to one s acquaintance with the
belief a causal relation. But for reasons unclear to me, the cases
Reid immediately cites as counterexamples to the identity thesis
are not these obvious ones but others that are either surprising
or of dubious polemical effectiveness. (As we will see in subse-
quent chapters, perception and recollection, on Reid s analysis,
also constitute counterexamples.)
Let s begin with a case cited by Reid as a counterexample that
most of us, I dare say, find surprising. Among the individual
objects that he can directly conceive [apprehend], says Reid, is
brain; but it ought to be observed, that such is the nature of body that it cannot change
its state, but by some force impressed upon it. This is not the nature of mind. Men
would never  have gone into this notion, that perception is owing to some action of the
object upon the mind, were it not, that we are so prone to form our notions of the
mind from some similitude we conceive between it and body. Thought in the mind is
conceived to have some analogy to motion in a body: and as a body is put in motion by
being acted upon by some other body; so we are apt to think the mind is made to per-
ceive, by some impulse it receives from the object. But reasonings, drawn from such
analogies, ought never to be trusted. They are, indeed, the cause of most of our errors
with regard to the mind (EIP II, xiv [301b]).
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Behind this comment is Reid s dualism; he thought of the human person as composed
of body and mind. But rejecting the dualism doesn t make the fundamental point any
less compelling: nobody has discovered any  mechanism that explains why sensory
experience and perception occur under the physical conditions that they do occur
under.
The Opening Attack 69
St. Paul s church in London. I have an idea of it; that is, I conceive it.
The immediate object of this conception is four hundred miles distant;
and I have no reason to think that it acts upon me, or that I act upon
it; but I can think of it notwithstanding. I can think of the first year, or
the last year of the Julian period. (EIP IV, ii [374b])
Why would Reid cite this as a counterexample to the identity
thesis? Surely every Way of Ideas theorist would concede that one
can get St. Paul s church in mind when four hundred miles
distant.
It s not clear that they would. The crucial word is  immediate :
the immediate object of this conception [apprehension] is four
hundred miles distant. Recall, once more, the central thought
of the Way of Ideas theorists: the only entities of which we have
immediate apprehension are those which are the immediate
cause of the act of apprehension. The only way for any other
entity to be apprehended is for one s apprehension of it to be
mediated by an immediate apprehension of a representation of
that entity  a representation which images that entity in the way
that a mountain s reflection in a lake images the mountain. Reid s
thought is that nothing of that sort takes place when I get St.
Paul s Church in mind by the apprehensive use of the singular
concept, St. Paul s Church. I don t fetch out of my memory a
certain church image, allow that image to cause immediate beliefs
about itself in me, then draw inferences from those beliefs about
the image to propositions about the external world and its rela-
tion to the cause, and thus get St. Paul s Church in mind. Con-
ceptual apprehension of something is more like apprehending
it by acquaintance than it is like apprehending it through the
mediation of a reflective image of itself: it s a manner, a mode, of
getting something in mind immediately, that is, without inter-
vening imagistic representations.25 We ll be discussing these issues
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