Peripatetic axiom

The Peripatetic axiom is: "Nothing is in the intellect that was not first in the senses". It is found in Thomas Aquinas's De veritate, q. 2 a. 3 arg. 19. Aquinas adopted this principle from the Peripatetic school of philosophy, established by Aristotle. Aquinas argued that the existence of God could be proved by reasoning from sense data. He used a variation on the Aristotelian notion of the "active intellect" which he interpreted as the ability to abstract universal meanings from particular empirical data.