 One way in which idealism might help to solve the skeptical problem is by attacking the Indirectness Principle. If the problem of the external world starts with the gap between the proximal and the distal objects of perceptual experience, then idealism would avoid skepticism by simply closing that gap. The idealist can embrace direct world-involvement while retaining the claim that nothing is ever directly present to the mind but its own mental states, by holding that the world is fundamentally mental, that, e.g., tables are just collections of ideas. Although metaphysical solutions are usually aimed at the Indirectness Principle, idealism also offers a response to PEW by way of undermining the Reasons Claim. Hume (1739) argued that we couldn’t have any good reason to think that external objects are plausible causes of our experiences without first observing a constant conjunction between external objects and experiences; but we can’t “observe” external objects unless we justifiedly believe in their existence, and we can only do that if we can reasonably posit them as plausible causes of our experiences. On the other hand, if the objects of perception are not external after all, we are in a better position to infer causal relations between them and individual experiences.