Chapter III
Other considerations concerning Innate Principles,
both Speculative and Practical
1. Principles not innate, unless their ideas be innate. Had those
who would persuade us that there are innate principles not taken
them together in gross, but considered separately the parts out of
which those propositions are made, they would not, perhaps, have
been so forward to believe they were innate. Since, if the ideas which
made up those truths were not, it was impossible that the propositions
made up of them should be innate, or our knowledge of them be born
with us. For, if the ideas be not innate, there was a time when the
mind was without those principles; and then they will not be innate,
but be derived from some other original. For, where the ideas
themselves are not, there can be no knowledge, no assent, no mental or
verbal propositions about them.
2. Ideas, especially those belonging to principles, not born with
children. If we will attentively consider new-born children, we
shall have little reason to think that they bring many ideas into
the world with them. For, bating perhaps some faint ideas of hunger,
and thirst, and warmth, and some pains, which they may have felt in
the womb, there is not the least appearance of any settled ideas at
all in them; especially of ideas answering the terms which make up
those universal propositions that are esteemed innate principles.
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