 Thus understood, “model” captures well the ways people have thought about what is ultimate. Taking a model’s target to be obscured per (1) and the model itself to be fallible per (2) is not only apt but also crucial for thinking about what is ultimate given our necessarily limited knowledge of it (see  Section 1.4).  Moreover, among the choices on the linguistic menu, “model” is a middle way. It is more specific than “idea” understood in the Cartesian sense as “whatever is immediately perceived by the  mind”,[16]  since a model is the more particular kind of idea just relayed. At the same time, “model” is general enough to cover the very diverse kinds of extant linguistic accounts of what is ultimate in the literature, including, e.g., “concepts” understood in the classic sense as necessary and sufficient conditions for being ultimate, such as Anselm’s idea of God as “that than which no greater can be conceived;” “conceptions” which are “more particular fillers” for more general concepts, such as Richard Swinburne’s verdict about what it would take to be that than which nothing greater can be  conceived;[17]  sustained “metaphors” such as Ramanuja’s Brahman as the “Soul” of the cosmos (see  Section 2.1)  or Sallie McFague’s “God as Mother, Lover and Friend” (1987); and “indexical signs” that point to an indeterminate ultimate visible in Neville (2013). This entry will call all these linguistic types “models” of what is ultimate, given that they each in their own way represent or aim at a target of what is ultimate for various purposes, at least as much as language can (more in  Section 1.4).[18]