 Cognitive empiricism may seem implicit in the tabula rasa principle that “nothing is in the intellect which was not first in the senses.” But the two positions are not identical, for one can deny that we have innate ideas or principles while also holding that the mind shapes what the senses provide. As G. W. Leibniz (1646–1716) would later remark, “nothing is in the intellect which was not first in the senses, except for: the intellect itself [nisi intellectus ipse]” (Leibniz NE 1.2). There are two contributions the intellect could make. It could predispose us to understand what we perceive in certain ways. (The “affordances” spoken of by James Gibson [1986: 127–43] can be thought of as dispositions of this kind.) Or it may have the capacity to receive a belief-forming influence from an external source, one not mediated by the senses. (For a medieval version of this idea, see  sect. 4.2.)  A thorough-going cognitive empiricism would deny the existence of either innate dispositions or non-sensory influences in the formation of beliefs. It would hold that the mind forms its beliefs by “selecting, combining, or otherwise manipulating simple ideas of sensation” (Kahn 1981: 407).