ABSTRACT
In the Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes asked that we consider “the commonest matters, those which we believe to be the most distinctly comprehended, to wit, the bodies which we touch and see”. Descartes’ first work was the never-completed treatise Rules for the Direction of the Mind, written about 1628 but not printed until 1701. One reading of the Rules suggests that Descartes might have begun his investigations as a direct realis. As will become apparent, the major barrier to implementing a two-term relation in visual perception is Descartes’ variant of the simulative assumption: The basis of vision is an image at the back of the eye. Descartes summarized how the requisite additional image is produced and observed in Optics. For Descartes, the images so formed in the back of the eye in the preceding way are images that pass beyond the retina and enter into the brain.
