 Maritain called his view “critical realism”, and argued particularly against the then-dominant rationalist and empiricist accounts of knowledge. He maintained that, despite the differences among them, Kantianism, idealism, pragmatism, and positivism all reflected the influence of nominalism—that universal notions are creations of the human mind and have no foundation in reality. Maritain’s critical realism holds that what the mind knows is identical with what exists. To know a thing is for its ‘essence’ to exist immaterially in the mind. This is not to say that the mind mirrors or copies that which it knows, but that, in virtue of the properties apprehended, it ‘becomes’ the things it knows. Maritain held that our knowledge of reality was through the ‘concept’—the esse intentionale—which was immaterial and universal, though the concept itself was something known only by reflection. Thus, when it comes to knowledge of sensible objects, for example, the mind has both a passive role (receiving sense impressions) and an active one (constructing knowledge from these impressions) (see Deely 1997, Munoz 2012).