It was in the 1600s that two great thinkers, Rene Descartes and John Locke, began to shape the foundations of epistemology through rationalism and empiricism respectively. They addressed the question, what is knowledge and how can it be acquired? I will show that empiricism is a good fit for the origin of knowledge. The idea of rationalism is based on the premise that certain truths are innate and come from deductive reasoning. The main point that he argues for is that knowledge is already within us and must merely be brought into focus. This method does not require that one go out and experiment with senses, but instead use the power of reason to conclude that something is true. His famous line, “I think, therefore I am,” illustrates this point by the fact that there is someone to do the thinking, which makes his existence irrefutable (Pojman, 492). By nature the opposition to this view is that a person does not come into this world with imprinted ideas, but rather through external sensible objects, or internal operations, one begins to perceive and thereby gain ideas and knowledge. This is how ideas spawn and this is the view held by Locke known as empiricism. Locke argues against the existence of innate ideas by explaining that a tabula rasa, or blank slate, is observable in a child. The child does not come pre-packaged with a mind full of ideas but rather it is by degrees that he or she comes to be furnished with them and that is through the senses (Pojman, 645). I cannot draw the line on when we start to absorb things around us such as space and light, but it is clear that in little children they do not come with innate ideas as Locke has mentioned. It is only when they start to perceive things from their senses and make connections through reflection that they obtain knowledge. Objects produce some type of energy and then that is transmitted to the sensory organs within our bodies. Our brain then translates that information