CHAP. II. BOOK I. borrowed principles; which being reputed and presumed to be the evident proofs of other things, are thought not to need any other proof themselves. Whoever shall receive any of these into his mind, and entertain them there with the reverence usually paid to principles, never venturing to examine them, but accustoming himself to believe them, because they are to be believed, may take up, from his education and the fashions of his country, any absurdity for innate principles; and by long poring on the same objects, so dim his sight as to take monsters lodged in his own brain for the images of the Deity, and the workmanship of his hands. must be examined. Principles 27. By this progress, how many there are who arrive at principles which they believe innate may be easily observed, in the variety of opposite principles held and contended for by all sorts and degrees of men. And he that shall deny this to be the method wherein most men proceed to the assurance they have of the truth and evidence of their principles, will perhaps find it a hard matter any other way to account for the contrary tenets, which are firmly believed, confidently asserted, and which great numbers are ready at any time to seal with their blood. And, indeed, if it be the privilege of innate principles to be received upon their own authority, without examination1, I know not what may not be believed, or how any one's principles can be questioned. If they may and ought to be examined and tried, I desire to know how first and innate principles can be tried; or at least it is reasonable to demand the marks and characters whereby the genuine innate principles may be distinguished from others: that so, amidst the great variety of pretenders, I may be kept from mistakes in so material a point as this. When this is done, I shall be ready to embrace such welcome and useful propositions; and till then I may with modesty doubt; since I fear universal consent, which is the only one produced, will scarcely prove It is the ready reception of 'customary' premisses, without criticism of their claims in reason, which makes Locke pursue with so much moral intensity this otherwise tedious argument. Accordingly, in this and the seven preceding sections, he dwells on the difficulty and danger of mistake in the process through which self-evident truth is realised in its self-evidence, while he overlooks the intellectual necessity and universality of the product, when it has at last been reached, by dint of reflective energy. a sufficient mark to direct my choice, and assure me of any BOOK I. innate principles. From what has been said, I think it past doubt, that there are no practical principles wherein all men agree; and therefore none innate1. 1 Although a conscious 'universal agreement' is necessarily the test of innateness, in Locke's meaning of 'innate,' it is not the only, nor indeed a possible, test of virtual innateness. Cf. Leibniz, and Reid, ut supra; also Kant's test of principles that are not CHAP. II. CHAPTER III. OTHER CONSIDERATIONS CONCERNING INNATE PRINCIPLES, BOOK I. I. HAD those who would persuade us that there are innate CHAP. III. Principles not taken them together in gross, but considered Principles separately the parts out of which those propositions are made, not innate, they would not, perhaps, have been so forward to believe they their Ideas were innate. Since, if the ideas which made up those truths be innate. were not, it was impossible that the propositions made up of unless those 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 them1. Ideas, 2. If we will attentively consider new-born children, we especially shall have little reason to think that they bring many ideas belonging into the world with them. For, bating perhaps some faint ideas of hunger, and thirst, and warmth, and some pains, which Principles, not born they may have felt in the womb, there is not the least appearChildren. ance of any settled ideas at all in them; especially of ideas to with CHAP. III. answering the terms which make up those universal propositions BOOK I. that are esteemed innate principles1. 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. ideas. 3. It is impossible for the same thing to be, and not to Impossibe,' is certainly (if there be any such) an innate principle. bility and Identity But can any one think, or will any one say, that 'impossibility' not innate 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 so1. 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 impossibile est idem esse, et non esse, that makes a child distinguish between its mother and 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. They are so far from being brought into the world with us, so remote from the thoughts of infancy and childhood, that I believe, upon examination it will be found that many grown men want them2. 1 Although 'universal' propositions are a priori and ultimate in rerum natura, they are not a priori in the time of their conscious apprehension. Their apriority is not in time, but as conditions of the constitution of our experience of what is real, and therefore of the nature of things. The argument which runs through the First Book continually overlooks this dis CHAP. III. Identity, an Idea not innate. BOOK I. 4. If identity (to instance that alone) be a native impression, and consequently so clear and obvious to us that we must needs know it even from our cradles, I would gladly be resolved by any one of seven, or seventy years old, whether a man, being a creature consisting of soul and body, be the same man when his body is changed? Whether Euphorbus and Pythagoras, having had the same soul, were the same men, though they lived several ages asunder1? Nay, whether the cock too, which had the same soul, were not the same with both of them 2? Whereby, perhaps, it will appear that our idea of sameness is not so settled and clear as to deserve to be thought innate in us. For if those innate ideas are not clear and distinct, so as to be universally known and naturally agreed on, they cannot be subjects of universal and undoubted truths, but will be the unavoidable occasion of perpetual uncertainty. For, I suppose every one's idea of identity will not be the same that Pythagoras and thousands of his followers have. And which then shall be true? Which innate? Or are there two different ideas of identity, both innate ? What makes the 5. Nor let any one think that the questions I have here same man? proposed about the identity of man are bare empty speculations; which, if they were, would be enough to show, that there was in the understandings of men no innate idea of identity. He that shall with a little attention reflect on the resurrection, and consider that divine justice will bring to judgment, at the last day, the very same persons, to be happy or miserable in the other, who did well or ill in this life, will find it perhaps not easy to resolve with himself, what makes the same man, or wherein identity consists; and will not be forward to think he, and every one, even children themselves, have naturally a clear idea of it 3. 1 The allusion is to the Pythagorean teaching about the transmigration of souls. Locke deals with the idea of 'identity' more fully under our complex ideas, Bk. II. ch. xxvii. * The reference is to Lucian's satire of the Pythagorean metempsychosis. 3 Locke puzzled himself about the meaning which should be expressed by the terms' identity,' ' same,' &c. Cf. Bk. II. ch. xxvii. See Bp. Butler's Dissertation on Personal Identity (1736), and Perronet's Vindication (1738), for a criticism and a defence of Locke, whose idea of sameness in persons has continued to be matter of controversy since. |