 Whether in the realist or idealist tradition, the direct presence theorist rejects the Indirectness Principle, insisting that when one perceives a cat, for example, the cat is directly in view, directly present to, simply there before the mind. But what is meant by these spatial metaphors? The metaphors can be unpacked in several importantly different ways, having different implications for the rest of PEW. In the next five subsections, I will briefly distinguish some different ways in which perception might be (or fail to be) direct. The spatial/metaphorical terminology has been so vastly prevalent in the literature that it is very often hard to tell which author intends which conception(s) of directness. Consequently, I won’t be naming names much in the next few paragraphs or pinning particular conceptions of directness on particular authors. Instead, these paragraphs aim to map out the more salient possibilities. Later, in sections  2.2  and  2.3,  I will use these distinctions to examine how the traditional metaphysical theories of perception bear on the epistemology of perception.