But in neither of these senses is it
innate. First, that it is not a principle which influences all men's
actions, is what I have proved by the examples before cited: nor
need we seek so far as Mingrelia or Peru to find instances of such
as neglect, abuse, nay, and destroy their children; or look on it only
as the more than brutality of some savage and barbarous nations,
when we remember that it was a familiar and uncondemned practice
amongst the Greeks and Romans to expose, without pity or remorse,
their innocent infants. Secondly, that it is an innate truth, known to
all men, is also false. For, "Parents preserve your children," is so
far from an innate truth, that it is no truth at all: it being a
command, and not a proposition, and so not capable of truth or
falsehood. To make it capable of being assented to as true, it must be
reduced to some such proposition as this: "It is the duty of parents
to preserve their children." But what duty is, cannot be understood
without a law; nor a law be known or supposed without a lawmaker, or
without reward and punishment; so that it is impossible that this,
or any other, practical principle should be innate, i.e. be
imprinted on the mind as a duty, without supposing the ideas of God,
of law, of obligation, of punishment, of a life after this, innate:
for that punishment follows not in this life the breach of this
rule, and consequently that it has not the force of a law in countries
where the generally allowed practice runs counter to it, is in
itself evident.
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