  Philosophers of the Abhidharma traditions had argued that our  cognitive propensities are beginningless, each thought being merely  the continuation of an endless series of previous thoughts, which  constantly inform, influence, and direct the cognitive process (see  AKBh ad III, 19). They maintained that these cognitive  propensities are most vividly manifest in traces of memory and in the activity of conceptual thought. The Buddhist epistemologists,  however, came to reject both memory (sṃrti) and  conceptual elaboration (kalpanā) as reliable sources of knowledge. These cognitive modalities were completely dissociated  from direct perception, the only type of cognitive awareness that  Dignāga regarded as warranted.