  Still, Scotus’s impact should not be overstated. Although divine illumination, so called, would no longer have many prominent supporters, the tendency toward supernatural explanations of cognitive phenomena would survive well beyond the Renaissance. Descartes, to take one prominent example, can speak of “certain seeds of truth which are naturally in our souls” (Discourse on Method 6, AT VI:64), and of “ideas implanted in the intellect by nature” (Principles of Philosophy 2.3). In its details, the view is strikingly similar to Aquinas’s: Descartes identifies these ideas as the basis of our knowledge of first principles; he holds that the ideas themselves are formed only in virtue of sensory impressions; he identifies God as the ultimate source of these ideas. Moreover, if Descartes is playing Aquinas, in modern dress, then as Henry of Ghent we can cast Malebranche, who argues that “All our ideas must be located in the efficacious substance of the Divinity, which alone is intelligible or capable of enlightening us, because it alone can affect intelligences” (Search after Truth, p. 232). Malebranche’s remarkable view — in support of which he quotes Augustine — is that all our ideas are seen in God. This is illumination theory, all over again. But by the seventeenth century the philosophical context has changed so dramatically that these modern developments must be regarded as a different topic.