Both the objects of the understanding and the will are ultimately rooted in God as Being and Goodness.
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).
But that objects of the understanding cannot be objects of taste seems a guiding assumption of much of the rest of the Enquiry: consider, for example, Burke's claim that it is only as an object of the imagination, and specifically not as an object of the understanding, that God can be found sublime (Burke 1990, 62).
Following the general Renaissance custom, Locke defined an idea as a mental entity: "whatever is the object of the understanding when a man thinks".
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).
On this view, "sensibility provides the differentials to a determined consciousness; the imagination produces from these [differentials] finite (determinate) objects of intuition; the understanding produces from the relations of these different differentials, which are its objects, the relation from which arise sensible objects".
In other words, will-less perception is perception of objects simply for the understanding of what they are essentially, in and for themselves, and without regard to the actual or possible relationships those phenomenal objects have to the striving self.
Shape measurement of an object facilitates the understanding of its working mechanisms in several phenomena in different scientific research areas as well as in technology and industry.
In each sense, the divine light acts not on us but on the objects of our understanding.
Another point worth recognizing at the outset about Hume's arguments in the Enquiry is that the kind of necessity he ascribes to human actions is the distinctively Humean one, according to which necessity "consists in the constant conjunction of like objects, or in the inference of the understanding from one object to another," which he takes to be "at bottom, the same" (ECHU 65).
