  Why, according to Locke, is Nativism not only unnecessary but illegitimate? One prominent theme is that if there were innate principles in the mind – his example is Whatsoever is, is – we would be aware of them, and they would therefore be universally assented to. But, he argues, children and idiots cannot even make sense of such claims, let alone assent to them.  He goes on to argue that various fallback positions – assent when they understand, assent when they begin to reason, capacity to assent under appropriate conditions – all reduce the claim to a sort of triviality. The upshot is that innateness is either a real alternative to Empiricism but obviously false, or trivially true but not incompatible with Empiricism.