 Those familiar with Reid’s writing on perception will immediately notice rather striking similarities between Hutcheson’s account of the moral sense and Reid’s account of external sense. To see this, consider a case of ordinary tactile perception, such as when one perceives that the table before one is hard by touching it. In cases such as these, how do we perceive the table’s hardness? According to Reid, in such cases, it is pressure sensations—which, Reid stresses, largely go unnoticed and unnamed—that immediately produce in us a “conception and belief” of the table that it is hard. As such, Reid says, the best explanation of how we perceive things such as a table’s hardness is that the “Author of our Nature” has designed us in such a way that, when all goes well, feelings of a certain range function as signs or indicators of it. (God, Reid emphasizes, could have easily fashioned us in such a way that the perceptual process worked differently. For all we reasonably believe, God could have constructed us in such a way that signs of an entirely different sort, such as noises or smells of a certain range, indicate a table’s hardness.) Reid stresses that, according to this account of perception, pressure sensations are not ideas in the sense that Locke or Hume thought of them. For pressure sensations do not function as intermediaries of which we are aware that imagistically represent the table’s hardness and from which we infer its existence.