 Olivi treats virtual attention—or directedness—not as a sui generis activity of the mind, but as a general kind of causal relationship that can be applied to physical agents just as much as to mental ones. For him, every natural physical agent has a virtual attention of this sort that extends as far as its causal force does (Summa II q. 23, pp. 424–25). One authority comments that Olivi’s virtual attention is “in fact equivalent to action at a distance” (Jansen 1921, p. 118), a characterization that seems apt in the case of physical effects such as the light of the sun that illuminates distant objects.