  This is at the heart of Desgabets’s “fundamental truth,” that for the proper use of reason we must recognize that all our ideas or simple conceptions have a real object outside of it, which is in itself what is represented by thought, and which actually contains the degree of being that one sees there. If individual bodies and sensible objects are modal beings in the sense claimed by Desgabets then there is no cleavage between object and object known because they are one and the same thing. What is represented to our thought is the real object of knowledge, namely, material and spiritual substance, but what we sense are these substances as they exist in time, or in other words, as they exist at a given time by thought in virtue of the particular local dispositions of matter. 