 The understanding of ideas as the only immediate objects of awareness arises in a number of texts. In the Sixth Meditation, while discussing sense perception and our ideas of external things, Descartes writes that the mind’s sensation extends strictly and immediately only to the ideas: “the ideas were, strictly speaking, the only immediate objects of my sensory awareness [solas proprie et immediate sentiebam]” (AT 7:75, CSM 2:52). In the Second Replies, Descartes defines thought “to include everything that is within us in such a way that we are immediately aware of it”; while defining idea in terms of the “immediate perception” that makes us “aware of the thought” (AT 7:160, CSM 2:113). And in the Third Replies he writes: “I make it quite clear in several places … that I am taking the word ‘idea’ to refer to whatever is immediately perceived by the mind” (AT 7:181, CSM 2:127).