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Kepler, Johannes – De Configurationibus harmonis

You may ask: how can there be an inborn knowledge of a thing that the mind neither has learned nor ever could learn if it were deprived of the sensory perception of external things?

Proclus answered this question in the language constantly used in his philosophy. Nowadays we very properly use, if I am not mistaken, the word "instinct."

For quantity is known to the human mind, and to the other souls, by instinct even though it were lacking all the senses for this purpose. The mind is of itself cognizant of the straight line and of an equal interval from one point and can thereby imagine a circle. If the mind can do that, it is even more possible for it to discover proof therein [viz., in the instinctus] and thus fulfil the function of the eye in looking at a diagram (if that were necessary).

In fact, the mind itself, if it had never possessed an eye, would demand an eye in order to comprehend things outside itself and would prescribe the laws of its formation, having obtained them from itself. . . .

The very cognition of the quantities, innate in the mind, dictates what the eye ought to be like, and therefore the eye has become what it is because mind is what it is, and not vice versa. But why make many words? Geometry is coeternal with the Mind of God before the creation of things; it is God Himself (what is in God that is not God Himself?) and has supplied God with the models for the creation of the world.

With the image of God it has passed into man, and was certainly not received within through the eyes.