Neither Principles Nor Ideas Are Innate on Superphysics

Introduction

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

An Inquiry into the Understanding pleasant and useful.

It is the UNDERSTANDING that:

sets man above the rest of sensible beings
gives him all the advantage and dominion over them

The understanding, like the eye, makes us see and perceive all other things. But it takes no notice of itself

There are No Innate Speculative Principles

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

How to prove that any Knowledge is not innate.

The understanding has certain INNATE PRINCIPLES; some primary notions, Κοινὰι εὔνοιαι, characters, as it were stamped upon the mind of man.

There are No Innate Practical Principles

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

No moral Principles so clear and so generally received as the forementioned speculative Maxims.

If those speculative Maxims, whereof we discoursed in the foregoing chapter, have not an actual universal assent from all mankind, as we there proved, it is much more visible concerning PRACTICAL Principles, that they come short of an universal reception: and I think it will be hard to instance any one moral rule which can pretend to so general and ready an assent as, “What is, is”; or to be so manifest a truth as this, that “It is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be.”

Speculative And Practical Considerations on Innate Principles

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

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.