 His view is briefly this. “Actual ideas” are ideas that are lively, clear, and distinct. Thought has a tendency to substitute “signs” (i. e., words or images) for actual ideas. While this tendency is useful and normally quite harmless, it impedes reasoning when “we are at a loss concerning a connection or consequence [between ideas], or have a new inference to draw, or would see the force of some new argument” (“Miscellanies,” no. 782; Edwards 1957–, vol. 18, 457). Since accurate reasoning about a subject matter requires attending to actual ideas of it, one can't accurately reason about religion if one lacks the relevant actual ideas. To have an actual idea of God, for example, one must have actual ideas of the ideas that compose it. But most of us don't. Those parts of the idea of God that everyone has (ideas of knowledge, power, and justice, for instance) either aren't attended to or, if they are, fail to elicit the appropriate affective reaction. In addition, we can't fully understand ideas of affections which we haven't experienced and so can't properly understand God's benevolence if we aren't benevolent ourselves. And without the simple idea of true beauty, one can understand neither God's holiness nor the facts that depend on it.