 So how do we get our hands on this cornucopia of epistemic goods? Spinoza warns that “ideas which are clear and distinct in us” (i.e., “adequate”, or manifestly true, ideas) “cannot follow from mutilated and confused ideas” (E5p28d; emphasis added). This would seem to preclude any possibility of progressing from imagination to intellect. Fortunately Spinoza leaves an escape hatch in the form of “common notions”, which he calls, appropriately, the “foundations” of reason, i.e., of the first of two kinds of intellectual cognition (E2p40s1). We may not be able to generate clear and distinct ideas from confused ideas, but not all is yet lost, because according to Spinoza even brute sense experience furnishes us with some necessarily true and adequate ideas (or, on innatist readings [see 3.1], triggers or activates such ideas).