In this passage, ideas are cast as modes of thought that represent (or present or exhibit — Descartes uses such terms interchangeably) "objects" to the mind.
Over a century ago, Jevons [1] addressed the question of how many objects the mind can "embrace at once", by enumerating the number of beans that fell into a box, in a single glance.
But Auriol is wrong in claiming that this is an instance of an intuitive cognition of something absent, because for Gregory the cognition is really caused by the species of some present object, although perhaps not the object that the mind thinks it is.
It also appears to have been modeled on familiar objects in the sense that, in perception, every property of an object outside the mind corresponded to a counterpart property within the mind; this was joined by the assumption that the latter somehow reproduced the former.
Vyāsa makes the argument that a mind which is empty of all objects can still know itself and thus it would have to become an object in the mind, i.e. itself.
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.
They simply present an object to the mind without taking a stance towards it.
The species is on his view a representation, namely a thing that stands in for the object in the mind.
Normally, however, the object at the mind door will be either a past memory or a concept.
