The Cambridge Platonists had a distinctly ambivalent attitude towards one of Plato's most well-known doctrines, the Theory of Recollection (anamnēsis). (See Anne Sheppard, pp. 9–10). On the one hand they embraced a close relative of the theory, the doctrine of innate ideas, which was bound up with their laudably Platonic belief that learning is essentially a matter of drawing upon one's own resources rather than relying wholesale on extrinsic sources. On the other hand they rejected, for a variety of reasons, any literal version of recollection itself. This essay will explore what led them into something of a love–hate relationship with Platonic recollection. I shall confine my discussion to those of them whose writings were most extensive on this subject, Whichcote, More and Cudworth.First,however, a note about the theory itself. It first appears in Plato's Meno (81a sq.), and Socrates attempts to demonstrate it by taking a slave boy and asking him questions about a geometrical figure drawn in the sand. At first the slave gives the wrong answers but after repeated questions solves the problem. At the end, Socrates insists that he never taught the boy anything, but only asked questions (85b–d). As the boy has never been taught geometry before in his life, Socrates concludes that he must have had the knowledge within him even before he entered his body: the retrieval of this knowledge is recollection. The theory reappears in the slightly later dialogue, the Phaedo (72e sq.) where it is bound up with the newly emerging theory of forms.