 To help us understand the mind’s engagement in perceptual “assimilation,” Nicholas turns to the work of sculptors and craftsmen who use wax or clay to make an impression of some shape so they can work from that likeness. When it is a matter of planning something to do or make, it is easy to see our minds as active. What about perceptual experiences where what we encounter is not up to us? Nicholas returns to the wax, asking us to imagine wax informed by mind in the way mind informs our capacities for sensing and proposing that mind so imagined could “form the wax to every shape presented to it.” (c.7) Nicholas is saying, in effect, that “assimilation” in perception is indeed a matter of reason’s active selecting and managing the deliverances of sense and imagination that result from our encounters with perceptible things. We are not mere passive recipients of colors, sounds, textures and so on, but our minds differentiate and connect perceptions and images in order to form concepts based on the discriminations of reason.