 Spinoza, however, discounted the relevance of observational data to the discovery of truths of nature. His conception of sense experience seems, in fact, to disqualify it from being a reliable source of information about the world altogether. He held that sense experience, in which the human body is affected by external bodies, can never provide us with adequate ideas of either external bodies or our own. He seems moreover to have denied that the method by which we discover new truths involves either the collection of new sensory evidence or the construction of crucial experiments. Indeed, much of the early Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect is devoted to establishing that “the fictitious, the false, and the other [ideas falling short of truth] have their origin in the imagination, i.e., in certain sensations that are fortuitous, and as it were disconnected, since they do not arise from the very power of the mind, but from external causes, as the body (whether awake or dreaming) receives various motions” (EMI, ¶84). The intellect unaided by imagination, however construed, is the sole source of knowledge. Observation, which involves sensory ideas derived from external causes, has no role in the true method for acquiring adequate knowledge.