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COPYRIGHT: John Barnden, 1997.
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Under this metaphor, ideas, thoughts, hopes, desires, images, emotions, feelings, etc., or events of thinking, imagining, hoping, desiring, feeling, etc., are viewed as physical objects.
The physical objects may be, but need not be, viewed as being within the agent's mind, when this is metaphorically viewed as a physical space.
Equally, they may be, but need not be, viewed as being in the real space surrounding the agent.
The physical objects can be of any sort, small, large, rigid, non-rigid, liquid, animate, inanimate, etc. In particular, a mass of ideas is sometimes viewed as a unit, and in that case it may be viewed as a body of fluid (cf. ``flow of ideas'').