The brain is the only kind of object capable of understanding that the cosmos is even there, or why there are infinitely many prime numbers, or that apples fall because of the curvature of space-time, or that obeying its own inborn instincts can be morally wrong, or that it itself exists.
Following the general Renaissance custom, Locke defined an idea as a mental entity: "whatever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks".
It is merely to say that they do not enjoy the mode of necessary being required of an object of unwandering understanding.
The term 'idea,' Locke tells us "…stands for whatsoever is the Object of the Understanding, when a man thinks" (Essay I, 1, 8, p. 47).
Each faculty has a proper object: the proper object of the understanding is truth, which has "being from Eternity in the Divine Ideas" (Astell 2002, 137); the proper object of the will is the good, which is God's will (Astell 2002, 206).
The sense of this difficult clause seems to be that mortals mistakenly suppose that an object of genuine understanding may be subject to the variableness implicit in their conception of it as being and not being the same, and being and not being not the same.
Both the objects of the understanding and the will are ultimately rooted in God as Being and Goodness.
In each sense, the divine light acts not on us but on the objects of our understanding.
Universal metaphysical principles, valid across the psychophysical schism, provide the framework within which the psychic facts can be "completed" and become proper objects of scientific understanding.
In the 1759 addition to A Philosophical Enquiry (the "Introduction on Taste") Burke allows that objects of the understanding constitute "a very considerable part of what are considered objects of Taste" (Burke 1990, 22).
