syllogistic method of reasoning observations lead to propositional statements, which when compounded lead to further abstract concepts.' He further argued that the intellect itself '.possesses levels of development from the static/material intellect ( al-‘aql al-hayulani), that potentiality can acquire knowledge to the active intellect ( al-‘aql al-fa‘il), the state of the human intellect at conjunction with the perfect source of knowledge.' empirical familiarity with objects in this world from which one abstracts universal concepts,' which develops through a '. He argued that the '.human intellect at birth resembled a tabula rasa, a pure potentiality that is actualized through education and comes to know,' and that knowledge is attained through '. In the eleventh century, the theory of tabula rasa was developed more clearly by the Persian philosopher Avicenna ( Ibn Sina in Persian). Perception, again, is an impression produced on the mind, its name being appropriately borrowed from impressions on wax made by a seal and perception they divide into, comprehensible and incomprehensible: Comprehensible, which they call the criterion of facts, and which is produced by a real object, and is, therefore, at the same time conformable to that object Incomprehensible, which has no relation to any real object, or else, if it has any such relation, does not correspond to it, being but a vague and indistinct representation.

The doxographer Aetius summarizes this view as 'When a man is born, the Stoics say, he has the commanding part of his soul like a sheet of paper ready for writing upon.' Diogenes Laërtius attributes a similar belief to the Stoic Zeno of Citium when he writes in Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers that: Stoic epistemology emphasizes that the mind starts blank, but acquires knowledge as the outside world is impressed upon it. This idea was further developed in Ancient Greek philosophy by the Stoic school. Have not we already disposed of the difficulty about interaction involving a common element, when we said that mind is in a sense potentially whatever is thinkable, though actually it is nothing until it has thought? What it thinks must be in it just as characters may be said to be on a writing-tablet on which as yet nothing stands written: this is exactly what happens with mind. In Western philosophy, the concept of tabula rasa can be traced back to the writings of Aristotle who writes in his treatise 'Περί Ψυχῆς' ( De Anima or On the Soul) of the 'unscribed tablet.' In one of the more well-known passages of this treatise he writes that:

Tabula rasa psychology