Human knowledge can be general and sometimes necessary — holding across all possible worlds, not just actual cases.

Leibniz, the other important Rationalist defender of innateness, elaborates the theory in a number of important ways in his New Essays on Human Understanding. He famously challenges Locke’s analogy of the mind as blank slate with a competing image of the mind as a block of marble whose veins already mark out the shape of Hercules (52). A more significant point is his sharpening of the poverty of the stimulus claim. He argues that our experience of the world is always of contingent particulars, b