 Advocates of the doctrine of divine illumination would not count as cognitive empiricists, for they held that the mind has access to a source of knowledge that is independent of the senses. What about those who rejected this doctrine? In many cases it is also difficult to regard them as cognitive empiricists, because of the remarkable power they continued to attribute to the mind: that of grasping the universals embedded in the singular objects of sense perception. What we see in the work of William of Ockham is a downgrading of this power, which goes hand-in-hand with a rethinking of the idea of universals. Ockham’s work thus laid the foundations on which early modern empiricists would build.