 Complicating an understanding of such passages is that Descartes scholarship is divided on whether to attribute to him some version of an indirect theory of perception, or instead some version of a direct theory. According to indirect perception accounts, in normal sensation the mind’s perception of bodies is mediated by an awareness of its ideas of those bodies. By contrast, direct perception interpretations allow that in normal sensation the mind’s ideas play a mediating role, though this role doesn’t have ideas functioning as items of awareness; rather, the objects of direct awareness are the external things, themselves. On both accounts, ideas mediate our perception of external objects. On direct theory accounts, the mediating role is only a process role. By analogy, various brain processes mediate our perception of external objects, but in the normal course of perception we are not consciously aware of those processes; and likewise for the mind’s ideas, according to direct perception accounts. On one recent version of an indirect perception interpretation, sensory ideas mediate our perception of the external bodies they’re of, in much the same way that pictures (or other representational media) mediate our perception of what they portray (Newman 2009). More generally, Descartes seems to view all ideas as mental pictures, of a sort. As he writes: “the term ‘idea’ is strictly appropriate” only for thoughts that “are as it were the images of things” (Med. 3, AT 7:37, CSM 2:25); he adds that “the ideas in me are like {pictures, or} images” (Med. 3, AT 7:42, CSM 2:29). 