CHARACTERS OF COMMON NOTIONS.

and Virtue given as eternal and universal truths. attested by some faculty, error by none.

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Every truth is

But in this introspection, the distinction must be borne in mind between veritas rei, of which the principium is without the mind, and veritas intellectus, which depends on the mind alone; in fine, between propositions always and everywhere true, and propositions true only here and now. [This seems to be an approach, in everything except the name, to the criterion of necessity afterwards brought forward by Leibnitz.] The mind is not a tabula rasa, but rather a closed book, that opens on the presentation of objects. Until called forth by objects, the common notions are latent. It is folly to suppose that they are brought in with the objects; they exist independently, being placed in us by nature. Nor is it any real difficulty that we do not understand how those notions are elicited; as little do we understand how touch, or taste, or smell is produced.

All common notions are not independent of Discursus, but such as are may be determined by the following characters. (1) Priority. Instinct precedes Discursus, and as already observed, is in animals the faculty of self-preservation. In a house built with regularity, beauty of symmetry is observed by natural instinct, long before reason comes in with its estimate of the proportions of the parts. (2) Independence. When a common notion has been obtained by observation, it may be deducible from some prior truth. Thus Man is an animal' depends for its truth upon the ultimate principle, that whatever affects our faculties in the same manner, is the same so far as we are concerned. Only the ultimate or underived truths are attributed to Natural Instinct. (3) Universality (excepting idiots and madmen). (4) Certainty. Those principles possess the highest authority, and, if understood, cannot be denied. (5) Paramount Utility (Necessitas). Without common notions, there would be no principle of self-preservation: they are therefore essential to the existence of the race or the individual. (6) Immediacy. The truth of them is seen, nulla interposita mora.

JOHN LOCKE. Locke discusses the subject of innate speculative principles in his Essay on the Human Understanding, B. I., chaps. 2, 4. Innate principles are a class of notions stamped on the mind, which the soul brings into the world with it. Are there any such? Certainly not, if it is shown how men may reach all the knowledge they have without such ideas. For it would be absurd to say that colour was innate in a man that had eyes. Locke's refutation paves the way for the fundamental principle of his psychology, that all our knowledge and ideas arise from sense and reflection.

1. The first argument for innate ideas is that certain principles are admitted as true universally. To this Locke answers, that the argument breaks down, (1) if any other way can be pointed out whereby this universal assent may be attained. (2) There are no principles universally admitted. Take two that have a high title

to be considered innate: 'whatever is, is,' and 'it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be.' These propositions are to a great part of mankind wholly unknown. They are unknown to children and idiots, and so they are not universally accepted. It would be a contradiction to say, that those propositions are imprinted on the mind, without the mind being conscious of them. That an idea is in the understanding, can only mean that it is understood. Hence, if there were innate ideas, they ought to be present in children and in idiots, as well as in others.

2. To avoid those exceptions, the universality is affirmed with qualifications; it is said that all men assent to those principles when they come to the use of reason. This can only mean either that the time of discovering those native inscriptions is when men come to the use of reason, or that reason assists in the discovery of them. (1) If reason discovered those principles, that would not prove them innate; for by reason we discover many truths that are not innate. Reason, as the faculty of deducing one truth from another, plainly cannot lead to innate principles. Reason should no more be necessary to decipher those native inscriptions, than to make our eyes perceive visible objects. (2) The coming to the use of reason is not the time of first knowing those maxims. How many instances have we of the exercise of reason by children before they learn that 'whatever is, is'! Many illiterate people and savages, long after they come to the use of reason, are altogether ignorant of maxims so general. Those truths are never known before the use of reason, but may possibly be assented to some time after during a man's life; and the same may be said of all other knowable truths. (3) If coming to the use of reason were the time of discovering the alleged innate notions, it would not prove them innate. For why should a notion be innate because it is first known when an entirely distinct faculty of the mind begins to exert itself? It would be as good an argument, (and as near the truth) to say that those maxims were first assented to when men came to the use of speech.

3. Another form of the argument is, that as soon as the propositions are heard, and their terms understood, they are assented to. Maxims that the mind, without any teaching and at the very first proposal, assents to, are surely innate. (1) But assent at first hearing is characteristic of a multitude of truths; such as, one and two are equal to three,' 'two bodies cannot be in the same place,' 'white is not black,' a square is not a circle,' &c. To every one of these, every man in his wits must assent at first hearing. And since no proposition can be innate, unless the ideas composing it be innate, then our ideas of colours, tastes, sounds, &c., will be innate. Nor can it be said that those propositions about concrete objects are drawn as consequences from the more general innate propositions, since the concrete judgments are known long before the abstract form. (2) Moreover, the argument of assent at first hearing supposes that those maxims may be unknown till proposed. For if they were ingrained in

OBJECTIONS TO INNATE IDEAS.

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the mind, why need they be proposed in order to gain assent ? Does proposing make them clearer? Then the teaching of men is better than the impression of nature, an opinion not favourable to the authority of innate truths. (3) It is sometimes said that the mind has an implicit knowledge of those principles, but not an explicit, before the first hearing. The only meaning that can be assigned to implicit or virtual knowledge, is that the mind is capable of knowing those principles. This is equally true of all knowledge, whether innate or not. (4) The argument of assent on first hearing is on the false supposition of no preceding teaching. Now, the words, and the meanings of the words, expressing the innate ideas, have been learned. And not only so, but the ideas that enter into the propositions are also acquired. If, then, we take out of a proposition the ideas in it and the words, what remains innate? A child assents to the proposition, an apple is not fire,' before it understands the terms of the maxim, it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be,' and consequently before it can assent to the more general proposition. In conclusion Locke sums up: if there were innate ideas, they would be found in all men; there are no ideas found in all men, hence there are no innate ideas. He adds some further considerations by way of supporting this conclusion.

4. Those maxims are not the first known, for children do not know them. How explain such ignorance of notions, imprinted on the mind in indelible characters, to be the foundation of all acquired knowledge? Children distinguish between the nurse and the cat, without the aid of the maxim, that the same thing cannot be and not be-for that is a maxim wholly unknown to them. If children brought any truths into the world with them, such truths ought to appear early, whereas, being made up of abstract terms, they appear late.

5. Innate ideas appear least where what is innate shows itself clearest. Children, savages, illiterate people, being the least corrupted by custom or borrowed opinions, ought to exhibit those innate notions-the endowments of nature-with purity and distinctness. But those are the very persons most destitute of universal principles of knowledge. General maxims are best known in the schools and academies, where they help debate, but do little to advance knowledge.

6. In chap. 4, Locke examines some alleged innate ideas. As a proposition is made up of ideas, the doctrine of innate maxims will be decisively refuted, if it be shown that there are no innate ideas. Thus, in the maxim, it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be,' Locke asks whether the notions of impossibility and identity be innate. He illustrates the difficulties involved in the conception of identity. Is a man, made as he is of body and soul, the same man when his body is changed? Were Euphorbus and Pythagoras, who had the same soul, the same man, though they lived ages asunder? And was the cock, that shared the soul with them, the same also? In what sense shall

we be the same men, when raised at the resurrection, that we are now? The notion of identity is far from being clear or distinct; can it then be the subject of undoubted and innate truth? Again take the maxim, 'the whole is bigger than a part.' This has a fair title to be considered innate. But whole and part have no meaning, except as applied to number and extension. If the maxim be innate, number and extension must also be innate. [Locke stopped here, thinking the point too clear for argument. But Kant afterwards adopted the paradox, and upheld the à priori character of Space as the corner-stone of his metaphysical construction.] In like manner, Locke examines whether the ideas of Worship and God are innate. In respect of the idea of God, he argues the subject at great length, applying most of the considerations that tell against innate ideas generally. He also discusses whether Substance be an innate idea. This idea, he observes, we have neither by sensation nor by reflection, and nature might with advantage have given it to us. For substance is a most confused notion, and is only a something of which we have no distinct positive idea, but which we take to be the substratum of our ideas.

SHAFTESBURY, in England, attempted to turn the edge of Locke's objections by declaring (but before Locke, the same had been affirmed) that all that was contended for was better expressed by the words Connate or Connatural than by the word innate : it was true the mind had no knowledge antecedent to experience, but it was so constituted or predisposed as inevitably to develop, with experience, ideas and truths not explained thereby.

In Germany, LEIBNITZ set up an elaborate defence of the Innate Theory, and is commonly represented as having made a distinct advance in the discussion of the question by the exceptions he took to the criticism of Locke. These are reducible to two. (1) He charges Locke with neglecting the difference between mere truths of fact or positive truths that may be arrived at by way of Inductive Experience, and necessary truths, or truths of demonstration, not to be proved except from principles implanted in the mind. (2) He charges Locke farther, with not seeing that innate knowledge is saved on simply making the unavoidable assumption that the intellect and its faculties are there from the first: the mind is innate to itself:''nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu, nisi ipse intellectus.' His detailed objections are to be found in his posthumous work, Nouveaux Essais sur l'entendement humain.

A passage in a letter of Leibnitz's to a friend, gives a good idea of the position he took up against Locke. He there says: In Locke there are various particular truths not badly set forth; but on the main point he is far from being right, and he has not caught the nature of the Mind and of Truth. If he had properly considered the difference between necessary truths, i.e. those which are known by Demonstration, and the truths that we arrive at to a certain degree by Induction, he would have seen that necessary truths can be proved only from principles implanted in the mind

NECESSARY TRUTHS AND TRUTHS OF FACT.

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-the so-called innate ideas; because the senses tell indeed what · happens, but not what necessarily happens. He has also failed to observe that the notions of the Existent, of Substance, Identity, the True and Good, are innate to our mind for the reason that it is innate to itself, and within itself comprehends them all. Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu, nisi ipse intellectus.' The Nouveaux Essais is a dialogue, continued through four books, corresponding to the books of Locke's essay, between Theophilus (Leibnitz himself) and Philalethes, a disciple of Locke. In Book I., Theophilus, after announcing that he has taken a new step in philosophy, and reached a point of view from which he can reconcile the discrepant views of former thinkers, declares that he goes beyond Descartes in accepting an innate idea of God; for rather all our thoughts and actions may be said to come from the depths of the soul itself without possibility of their being given by the senses. He will not, however, go into the demonstration of that at present, but content himself with making clear, on the common system, that there are ideas and principles that do not come from the senses, but are found within the mind, unformed by us, although the senses give us occasion to apprehend them. Locke, with all his power, failed to see the difference between necessary truths, whose source is in the understanding, and truths of fact drawn from sense, experience, and confused perceptions. The certitude of innate principles (such as, Every thing that is, is; It is impossible that a thing should be and not be at the same time) is not to be based on the fact of universal consent, which can only be an index to, and never a demonstration of, them: it comes only from what is in us. Even though unknown, they are not therefore not innate, for they are recognized as soon as understood. In the mind there is always an infinity of cognitions that are not consciously apprehended; and so the fact of their not being always apprehended makes nothing against the existence of (1) the pure ideas (opposed to the phantasms of sense) and (2) necessary truths of reason (in contrast to truths of fact) asserted to be graven on the mind. That the necessary truths of Arithmetic and Geometry exist thus virtually in the mind appears from the established possibility of drawing them forth out of a wholly untutored mind. But, in fine, the position to stand by is the difference that there is between necessary and eternal truths and mere truths of experience. The mind is able to know the one and the other, but of the first it is the source; and whatever number of particular experiences there may be of a universal truth, there can be no perpetual assurance of it, except its necessity is known by reason." Elsewhere he mentions as things that the senses cannot give; 'Substance, the One, the Same, Cause, Perception, Reasoning;' but otherwise merely repeats in different language statements like the above.

When Philalethes suggests that the ready consent of the mind to certain truths is sufficiently explained by the general faculty of knowing, Theophilus replies as follows: Very true; but it is this particular relation of the human mind to these truths that