 Let us pursue this inroad into Malebranche’s theory of cognition, beginning with his Cartesian inheritance. Descartes is often read as holding a representative theory of perception, according to which our perception of material objects is mediated by ideas. Ideas are the immediate objects of perception and, via these ideas, we are able to perceive bodies in the world. He encourages such a reading in the Third Meditation, where he famously says that all ideas are ‘as it were the images of things’ (CSM 2:25, AT 7:37). Descartes explicitly denies that ideas are mental images; however, he suggests here that they are like images in the sense that they represent objects in the world.