 Sometimes, it can seem as though Wittgenstein just expected to hit upon the simples by reflecting from the armchair on those items that struck him as most plausibly lacking in proper parts. This impression is most strongly suggested in the Notebooks, and in particular in a passage from June 1915 in which Wittgenstein seems to express confidence that certain objects already within his ken either count as Tractarian objects or will turn out to do so. He says: “It seems to me perfectly possible that patches in our visual field are simple objects, in that we do not perceive any single point of a patch separately; the visual appearances of stars even seem certainly to be so” (NB, 64). By “patches in our visual field” in this context Wittgenstein means parts of the visual field with no noticeable parts. In other words, points in visual space (cf. KL, 120). Clearly, then, Wittgenstein at one stage believed he was in a position to specify some Tractarian objects. However, the balance of the evidence suggests that this idea was short-lived. For he was later to say that he and Russell had pushed the question of examples of simples to one side as a matter to be settled on a future occasion (AM, 11). And when Norman Malcolm pressed Wittgenstein to say whether when he wrote the Tractatus he had decided on anything as an example of a “simple object,” he had replied — according to Malcolm’s report — that “at the time his thought had been that he was a logician; and that it was not his business as a logician, to try to decide whether this thing or that was a simple thing or a complex thing, that being a purely empirical matter” (Malcolm 1989, 70).