 There is a problem here for anyone who wants to regard Aristotle as an empiricist. While his epagōgē certainly draws on the deliverances of the senses, and could not operate without them, it seems to go beyond what the senses could reveal. For Aristotle, as we have seen, sensation is reliable when it comes to its proper objects: colours, sounds, tastes, smells, and tangible properties. But there is a gap between sensing such properties and perceiving the characteristics that are essential to objects of a particular kind (Taylor 1990: 127–28). Even if we can reliably synthesize the proper objects of perception into the objects of everyday experience (tables, trees, and so on), it requires a further step to decide which properties belong necessarily to such objects. (For a less pessimistic view of the powers of epagōgē, see Barnes 1994: 267–71.)