 Cook Wilson’s rejection of ‘hybrid’ accounts of knowledge (see the previous section) is linked to his rejection of epistemological ‘intermediaries’, so that knowledge could not be of some such ‘objectified’ appearance. He considered all such intermediaries (‘images’, ‘copies’, ‘representative’, tertium quid, etc.) as “not only useless in philosophy but misleading as tending to obscure the solution of a difficult problem” (SI, 772). In this he stood in the tradition of Thomas Reid, his arguments were as a matter of fact first developed against the empiricism of Locke, Berkeley and Hume (for example in UL (§ 10)). In his letter to Stout, Cook Wilson put it thus: