  The second point of particular importance in Du Châtelet's discussion of first principles of knowledge is what may be taken as her moderate form of nativism, in contrast with Descartes' much stronger form. Du Châtelet does not have the sort of first principles of knowledge, together with a commitment to voluntarism, that lead to the doctrine of innate ideas, as we see in Descartes. That is, Descartes has been characterized as a voluntarist who believes that God created the eternal truths through an act of will; God did not understand, through an act of the intellect, that the eternal truths just are true independently of any will, his own included. Fine details on Descartes' position with respect to the voluntarist-intellectual debate aside, it is true that he does believe God endowed all rational creatures with innate ideas of the eternal truths such that we might all come to know their certain truth despite the fact that they could have been otherwise. Du Châtelet does not endorse this kind of nativism. But it is true that, unlike Locke for  example,[10] she does think there are some universally held principles such as the belief that something cannot be and not be at the same time (PC), and to this degree, she does seem committed to some sort of nativism. But because of her requirement that one demonstrate a contradiction (in the case of the PC) or that one demonstrate the reasons one has for one's actions (in the case of the PSR, e.g. IP §8, p. 128–9) in employing these universally-held first principles of knowledge, her nativism is of a different and weaker form than is Descartes' nativism. Hers describes innate rules of reasoning that (as we shall see) can then be used to develop a metaphysics, while Descartes' nativism directly delivers robust metaphysical information about the world. Once again, we see shall the impact of this characteristic of Du Châtelet's starting point upon her methodology as well as her understanding of the relation between physics and metaphysics.