 Descartes and Newton understood physical objects as complex mechanisms, clockworks, artifacts of a divine clockmaker, operating on each other and on human perceivers to welcome or unwelcome effect in accord with simple exceptionless mechanical laws. Berkeley understood them as assemblages of visual ideas, conventional signs in a language God employs to point out potentially pleasurable opportunities and potentially painful dangers to dependent finite spirits like ourselves. Turbayne thinks these disparate understandings of physical objects are best viewed not as competing theories but as compatible and complementary metaphors.