ABSTRACT
Despite the attractions of an interpretation of Locke's usage of 'idea' in the light of Descartes' and Arnauld's explanation of its ambiguity, the identification of ideas (in one sense of 'idea') with intentional objects supplies us with a difficult and slippery interpretive model. Even Arnauld, as we have seen, found it impossible to maintain what at one point he seems to promise: a view which allows that we immediately perceive external things. His reason seems to have been that, because an account of the intentional object of a perception is an account of the perception, giving what Descartes had called its 'form', it is therefore not an account of the real object. Such an account can be true, after all, even when no real object exists; and if its truth or falsity is to that extent unaffected by what lies outside us, how can it be concerned with what lies outside us? It might be said that we can make an actually existing thing the logical subject of the account, in saying, for example, that the (real) sun appears red: but then (so Descartes and, even more clearly, Arnauld insisted) what is predicated of the real thing is a merely relational attribute, whereas what is predicated of the sun in the mind is intrinsic to it. The real sun and the sun in the mind are distinct. So even if Locke used 'idea' consistently to mean the intentional object of thought, he might still have had something like Arnauld's reflexive awareness in mind when he wrote that 'the Mind, in all its Thoughts and Reasonings, hath no other immediate Object but its own Ideas, which alone it does or can contemplate' .124 Whether that would be 'direct realism' is doubtful.
