  As it happens, the Rationalist can resist the temptation to invoke God, and avoid the dead-end to which it leads. For Descartes, the presence in us of innate materials is of course a contingent fact, but the warrant for the deeper truths we derive from what is innate does not involve any premises about their origin. It is because we have innate ideas that we can think of mind and extension in the abstract way we do. But the principle that matter (extension) cannot think is an a priori truth (according to Descartes) because we see clearly and distinctly that it is holds. Clarity-and-distinctness as a criterion of truth raises its own difficulties, but the difficulties are not the obvious and devastating ones raised above. Once we disentangle Nativism from Rationalism, we can look back and identify the non-Nativist Rationalist elements in Aristotle, and see Rationalist elements in the Empiricist and arch anti-Nativist Locke. Both present us with forms of Rationalism without Nativism. By the same light, contemporary nativists inspired by Chomsky’s Linguistic Nativism are emphatically  anti-Rationalist.[6]