... the Rationalist places the origin of our knowledge of reality in the powers of the mind, whereas the Empiricist places it in our powers of perception. The most famous rationalist is certainly Descartes, who said that the true source of knowledge was the mind and reason. From his famous discussion of the piece of wax, Descartes established that knowledge is a priori (prior to experience), since, in the example, our senses perceive different objects even though we know that the wax is the same wax in either its solid or liquid state. .As the father of rationalism, Descartes, will say in the Meditations on First Philosophy: "Among my ideas, some appear to be innate, some to be adventitious ['coming from outside'], and others to have been invented by me." Descartes would also have to say that an innate idea is by no means always a conscious idea; otherwise, he would have ...

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