Another principle of classification leads to a list of 18 elements (dhatus): five sense organs, five objects of those senses, mind, the specific object of mind, and six kinds of consciousness (visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactual, and purely mental).
Like most people, he accepted and built on "two heads," "two kinds entirely distinct and heterogeneous": (1) active mind or spirit, perceiving, thinking, and willing, and (2) passive objects of mind, namely sensible ideas (sense-data) or imaginable ideas.
There will be no separation or distancing between an object of the mind and the activity of the mind itself.
This tendency has obvious evolutionary advantages -- it's safer to keep deadly objects front-of-mind than to ignore them--and as a result, our brains seem to be hardwired so that scary experiences contain hidden fascination, and fascinating experiences are often scary.
Rejecting the notion that ideas are the direct object of the mind's awareness, Reid substituted a view of perception in which sensations "suggest" material objects.
That's because beauty is exclusively an object of the mind.
Only then can it recognize that it is different from the puruṣa which cannot be known in itself because it cannot become an object of the mind.
Finally, human nature in its absolute consideration is the same nature abstracted even from this being, i.e., even from being an object of the mind.
However, what distinguishes the universal concept from a merely fictitious object of our mind is that the former corresponds to a status of really existing singular things, whereas the latter does not have anything corresponding to it.
And I'm not talking about objective labels here -- I'm talking about the reactive deeming of whatever the object of my mind's attention is as "bad" or "good".
Although it is reported that very young infants have different responses to humans than to non-human objects, Theory of Mind develops relatively gradually and possibly results from predictable interactions with adults.
