 The second statement above, (2′), expresses Reid’s commitment to a broadly teleological account of human agency, according to which autonomous human action is explained not by the impulses that present themselves to an agent when deliberating but by the ends for which she acts. In his defense of this view, Reid argues that, contrary to the adherents of the System of Necessity, motives are not mental states that cause us to act, for motives are not the right sort of thing to be causes: They are not agents. In some places, in fact, Reid says that motives (as he thinks of them) have no “real existence,” by which he seems to mean (at least) that they are not part of the spatio-temporal manifold but are abstracta (see EAP IV.iv: 214).