One may perceive how, by degrees, afterwards, ideas come into their
minds; and that they get no more, nor other, than what experience, and
the observation of things that come in their way, furnish them with;
which might be enough to satisfy us that they are not original
characters stamped on the mind.
3. "Impossibility" and "identity" not innate ideas. "It is
impossible for the same thing to be, and not to be," is certainly
(if there be any such) an innate principle. But can any one think,
or will any one say, that "impossibility" and "identity" are two
innate ideas? Are they such as all mankind have, and bring into the
world with them? And are they those which are the first in children,
and antecedent to all acquired ones? If they are innate, they must
needs be so. Hath a child an idea of impossibility and identity,
before it has of white or black, sweet or bitter? And is it from the
knowledge of this principle that it concludes, that wormwood rubbed on
the nipple hath not the same taste that it used to receive from
thence? Is it the actual knowledge of impossible est idem esse, et non
esse, that makes a child distinguish between its mother and a
stranger; or that makes it fond of the one and flee the other? Or does
the mind regulate itself and its assent by ideas that it never yet
had? Or the understanding draw conclusions from principles which it
never yet knew or understood? The names impossibility and identity
stand for two ideas, so far from being innate, or born with us, that I
think it requires great care and attention to form them right in our
understandings.
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