Reid declared Hume's appeal to variation in the magnitude of a table with distance to be the best argument that had ever been offered for the ‘ideal hypothesis’ that we experience nothing but our own mental states. Reid's principal objection to this argument fails to apply to minimally visible points. He did establish that we have reason to take our perceptions to be caused by external objects. But his case that we directly perceive external objects is undermined by what Hume had to say about the role played by color in our perception of the primary qualities of bodies.

We no longer believe that the mind is a blank slate that simply records sense‐data as given. Over the last two centuries, we have become increasingly aware of the fact that we bring something to what is given to us in experience. It is what we bring to our experience in the form of our conceptual perspective that molds and shapes our understanding or interpretation of the experience. This is especially true of religious experience. What is given in our God experiences is from God, but our interpretive understanding and reaction to our God experiences are uniquely our own. This paper considers several aspects of religious experience from such a phenomenal perspective.