 Although they follow analytically from the meanings of ideas our minds supply, necessary truths are nevertheless informative statements about the physical world outside us; they have empirical content. Whewell’s justification for this claim is a theological one. Whewell noted that God created the universe in accordance with certain “Divine Ideas.” That is, all objects and events in the world were created by God to conform to certain of his ideas. For example, God made the world such that it corresponds to the idea of Cause partially expressed by the axiom “every event has a cause.” Hence in the universe every event conforms to this idea, not only by having a cause but by being such that it could not occur without a cause. On Whewell’s view, we are able to have knowledge of the world because the Fundamental Ideas which are used to organize our sciences resemble the ideas used by God in his creation of the physical world. The fact that this is so is no coincidence: God has created our minds such that they contain these same ideas. That is, God has given us our ideas (or, rather, the “germs” of the ideas) so that “they can and must agree with the world” (1860a, 359). God intends that we can have knowledge of the physical world, and this is possible only through the use of ideas which resemble those that were used in creating the world. Hence with our ideas—once they are properly “unfolded” and explicated—we can colligate correctly the facts of the world and form true theories. And when these ideas are distinct, we can know a priori the axioms which express their meaning.