Tabula rasa (Latin: "scraped tablet," though often translated "blank slate") is the notion, popularized by John Locke(1693), that the human mind receives knowledge and forms itself based on experience alone, without any pre-existing innate ideas that would serve as a starting point. Tabula rasa thus implies that individual human beings are born "blank" (with no built-in mental content), and that their identity is defined entirely by their experiences and sensory perceptions of the outside world. In general terms, the contention that we start life literally “from scratch” can be said to imply a one-sided emphasis on empiricism over idealism.