An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding
IN FOUR BOOKS
By John Locke
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_Quam bellum est velle confiteri potius nescire quod nescias, quam ista
effutientem nauseare, atque ipsum sibi displicere!_
Cic. de Natur. Deor. _l_. 1.
LONDON:
Printed by Eliz. Holt, for Thomas Basset, at the George in Fleet Street, near
St. Dunstan’s Church.
MDCXC
CONTENTS
THE EPISTLE TO THE READER
ESSAY CONCERNING HUMANE UNDERSTANDING.
BOOK I NEITHER PRINCIPLES NOR IDEAS ARE INNATE
CHAPTER I. INTRODUCTION.
CHAPTER II. NO INNATE SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES.
CHAPTER III. NO INNATE PRACTICAL PRINCIPLES
CHAPTER IV. OTHER CONSIDERATIONS CONCERNING INNATE PRINCIPLES, BOTH SPECULATIVE AND PRACTICAL.
BOOK II OF IDEAS
CHAPTER I. OF IDEAS IN GENERAL, AND THEIR ORIGINAL.
CHAPTER II. OF SIMPLE IDEAS.
CHAPTER III. OF SIMPLE IDEAS OF SENSE.
CHAPTER IV. IDEA OF SOLIDITY.
CHAPTER V. OF SIMPLE IDEAS OF DIVERS SENSES.
CHAPTER VI. OF SIMPLE IDEAS OF REFLECTION.
CHAPTER VII. OF SIMPLE IDEAS OF BOTH SENSATION AND REFLECTION.
CHAPTER VIII. SOME FURTHER CONSIDERATIONS CONCERNING OUR SIMPLE IDEAS OF SENSATION.
CHAPTER IX. OF PERCEPTION.
CHAPTER X. OF RETENTION.
CHAPTER XI. OF DISCERNING, AND OTHER OPERATIONS OF THE MIND.
CHAPTER XII. OF COMPLEX IDEAS.
CHAPTER XIII. COMPLEX IDEAS OF SIMPLE MODES:—AND FIRST, OF THE SIMPLE MODES OF IDEA OF SPACE.
CHAPTER XIV. IDEA OF DURATION AND ITS SIMPLE MODES.
CHAPTER XV. IDEAS OF DURATION AND EXPANSION, CONSIDERED TOGETHER.
CHAPTER XVI. IDEA OF NUMBER.
CHAPTER XVII. OF INFINITY.
CHAPTER XVIII. OTHER SIMPLE MODES.
CHAPTER XIX. OF THE MODES OF THINKING.
CHAPTER XX. OF MODES OF PLEASURE AND PAIN.
CHAPTER XXI. OF POWER.
CHAPTER XXII. OF MIXED MODES.
CHAPTER XXIII. OF OUR COMPLEX IDEAS OF SUBSTANCES.
CHAPTER XXIV. OF COLLECTIVE IDEAS OF SUBSTANCES.
CHAPTER XXV. OF RELATION.
CHAPTER XXVI. OF CAUSE AND EFFECT, AND OTHER RELATIONS.
CHAPTER XXVII. OF IDENTITY AND DIVERSITY.
CHAPTER XXVIII. OF OTHER RELATIONS.
CHAPTER XXIX. OF CLEAR AND OBSCURE, DISTINCT AND CONFUSED IDEAS.
CHAPTER XXX. OF REAL AND FANTASTICAL IDEAS.
CHAPTER XXXI. OF ADEQUATE AND INADEQUATE IDEAS.
CHAPTER XXXII. OF TRUE AND FALSE IDEAS.
CHAPTER XXXIII. OF THE ASSOCIATION OF IDEAS.
TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE THOMAS, EARL OF PEMBROKE AND MONTGOMERY, BARON
HERBERT OF CARDIFF LORD ROSS, OF KENDAL, PAR, FITZHUGH, MARMION, ST.
QUINTIN, AND SHURLAND;
LORD PRESIDENT OF HIS MAJESTY’S MOST HONOURABLE PRIVY COUNCIL; AND LORD
LIEUTENANT OF THE COUNTY OF WILTS, AND OF SOUTH WALES.
MY LORD,
This Treatise, which is grown up under your lordship’s eye, and has
ventured into the world by your order, does now, by a natural kind of
right, come to your lordship for that protection which you several
years since promised it. It is not that I think any name, how great
soever, set at the beginning of a book, will be able to cover the
faults that are to be found in it. Things in print must stand and fall
by their own worth, or the reader’s fancy. But there being nothing more
to be desired for truth than a fair unprejudiced hearing, nobody is
more likely to procure me that than your lordship, who are allowed to
have got so intimate an acquaintance with her, in her more retired
recesses. Your lordship is known to have so far advanced your
speculations in the most abstract and general knowledge of things,
beyond the ordinary reach or common methods, that your allowance and
approbation of the design of this Treatise will at least preserve it
from being condemned without reading, and will prevail to have those
parts a little weighed, which might otherwise perhaps be thought to
deserve no consideration, for being somewhat out of the common road.
The imputation of Novelty is a terrible charge amongst those who judge
of men’s heads, as they do of their perukes, by the fashion, and can
allow none to be right but the received doctrines. Truth scarce ever
yet carried it by vote anywhere at its first appearance: new opinions
are always suspected, and usually opposed, without any other reason but
because they are not already common. But truth, like gold, is not the
less so for being newly brought out of the mine. It is trial and
examination must give it price, and not any antique fashion; and though
it be not yet current by the public stamp, yet it may, for all that, be
as old as nature, and is certainly not the less genuine. Your lordship
can give great and convincing instances of this, whenever you please to
oblige the public with some of those large and comprehensive
discoveries you have made of truths hitherto unknown, unless to some
few, from whom your lordship has been pleased not wholly to conceal
them. This alone were a sufficient reason, were there no other, why I
should dedicate this Essay to your lordship; and its having some little
correspondence with some parts of that nobler and vast system of the
sciences your lordship has made so new, exact, and instructive a
draught of, I think it glory enough, if your lordship permit me to
boast, that here and there I have fallen into some thoughts not wholly
different from yours. If your lordship think fit that, by your
encouragement, this should appear in the world, I hope it may be a
reason, some time or other, to lead your lordship further; and you will
allow me to say, that you here give the world an earnest of something
that, if they can bear with this, will be truly worth their
expectation. This, my lord, shows what a present I here make to your
lordship; just such as the poor man does to his rich and great
neighbour, by whom the basket of flowers or fruit is not ill taken,
though he has more plenty of his own growth, and in much greater
perfection. Worthless things receive a value when they are made the
offerings of respect, esteem, and gratitude: these you have given me so
mighty and peculiar reasons to have, in the highest degree, for your
lordship, that if they can add a price to what they go along with,
proportionable to their own greatness, I can with confidence brag, I
here make your lordship the richest present you ever received. This I
am sure, I am under the greatest obligations to seek all occasions to
acknowledge a long train of favours I have received from your lordship;
favours, though great and important in themselves, yet made much more
so by the forwardness, concern, and kindness, and other obliging
circumstances, that never failed to accompany them. To all this you are
pleased to add that which gives yet more weight and relish to all the
rest: you vouchsafe to continue me in some degrees of your esteem, and
allow me a place in your good thoughts, I had almost said friendship.
This, my lord, your words and actions so constantly show on all
occasions, even to others when I am absent, that it is not vanity in me
to mention what everybody knows: but it would be want of good manners
not to acknowledge what so many are witnesses of, and every day tell me
I am indebted to your lordship for. I wish they could as easily assist
my gratitude, as they convince me of the great and growing engagements
it has to your lordship. This I am sure, I should write of the
UNDERSTANDING without having any, if I were not extremely sensible of
them, and did not lay hold on this opportunity to testify to the world
how much I am obliged to be, and how much I am,
MY LORD,
Your Lordship’s most humble and most obedient servant,
JOHN LOCKE
2 Dorset Court, 24th of May, 1689
THE EPISTLE TO THE READER
READER,
I have put into thy hands what has been the diversion of some of my
idle and heavy hours. If it has the good luck to prove so of any of
thine, and thou hast but half so much pleasure in reading as I had in
writing it, thou wilt as little think thy money, as I do my pains, ill
bestowed. Mistake not this for a commendation of my work; nor conclude,
because I was pleased with the doing of it, that therefore I am fondly
taken with it now it is done. He that hawks at larks and sparrows has
no less sport, though a much less considerable quarry, than he that
flies at nobler game: and he is little acquainted with the subject of
this treatise—the UNDERSTANDING—who does not know that, as it is the
most elevated faculty of the soul, so it is employed with a greater and
more constant delight than any of the other. Its searches after truth
are a sort of hawking and hunting, wherein the very pursuit makes a
great part of the pleasure. Every step the mind takes in its progress
towards Knowledge makes some discovery, which is not only new, but the
best too, for the time at least.
For the understanding, like the eye, judging of objects only by its own
sight, cannot but be pleased with what it discovers, having less regret
for what has escaped it, because it is unknown. Thus he who has raised
himself above the alms-basket, and, not content to live lazily on
scraps of begged opinions, sets his own thoughts on work, to find and
follow truth, will (whatever he lights on) not miss the hunter’s
satisfaction; every moment of his pursuit will reward his pains with
some delight; and he will have reason to think his time not ill spent,
even when he cannot much boast of any great acquisition.
This, Reader, is the entertainment of those who let loose their own
thoughts, and follow them in writing; which thou oughtest not to envy
them, since they afford thee an opportunity of the like diversion, if
thou wilt make use of thy own thoughts in reading. It is to them, if
they are thy own, that I refer myself: but if they are taken upon trust
from others, it is no great matter what they are; they are not
following truth, but some meaner consideration; and it is not worth
while to be concerned what he says or thinks, who says or thinks only
as he is directed by another. If thou judgest for thyself I know thou
wilt judge candidly, and then I shall not be harmed or offended,
whatever be thy censure. For though it be certain that there is nothing
in this Treatise of the truth whereof I am not fully persuaded, yet I
consider myself as liable to mistakes as I can think thee, and know
that this book must stand or fall with thee, not by any opinion I have
of it, but thy own. If thou findest little in it new or instructive to
thee, thou art not to blame me for it. It was not meant for those that
had already mastered this subject, and made a thorough acquaintance
with their own understandings; but for my own information, and the
satisfaction of a few friends, who acknowledged themselves not to have
sufficiently considered it.
Were it fit to trouble thee with the history of this Essay, I should
tell thee, that five or six friends meeting at my chamber, and
discoursing on a subject very remote from this, found themselves
quickly at a stand, by the difficulties that rose on every side. After
we had awhile puzzled ourselves, without coming any nearer a resolution
of those doubts which perplexed us, it came into my thoughts that we
took a wrong course; and that before we set ourselves upon inquiries of
that nature, it was necessary to examine our own abilities, and see
what OBJECTS our understandings were, or were not, fitted to deal with.
This I proposed to the company, who all readily assented; and thereupon
it was agreed that this should be our first inquiry. Some hasty and
undigested thoughts, on a subject I had never before considered, which
I set down against our next meeting, gave the first entrance into this
Discourse; which having been thus begun by chance, was continued by
intreaty; written by incoherent parcels; and after long intervals of
neglect, resumed again, as my humour or occasions permitted; and at
last, in a retirement where an attendance on my health gave me leisure,
it was brought into that order thou now seest it.
This discontinued way of writing may have occasioned, besides others,
two contrary faults, viz., that too little and too much may be said in
it. If thou findest anything wanting, I shall be glad that what I have
written gives thee any desire that I should have gone further. If it
seems too much to thee, thou must blame the subject; for when I put pen
to paper, I thought all I should have to say on this matter would have
been contained in one sheet of paper; but the further I went the larger
prospect I had; new discoveries led me still on, and so it grew
insensibly to the bulk it now appears in. I will not deny, but possibly
it might be reduced to a narrower compass than it is, and that some
parts of it might be contracted, the way it has been writ in, by
catches, and many long intervals of interruption, being apt to cause
some repetitions. But to confess the truth, I am now too lazy, or too
busy, to make it shorter. I am not ignorant how little I herein consult
my own reputation, when I knowingly let it go with a fault, so apt to
disgust the most judicious, who are always the nicest readers. But they
who know sloth is apt to content itself with any excuse, will pardon me
if mine has prevailed on me, where I think I have a very good one. I
will not therefore allege in my defence, that the same notion, having
different respects, may be convenient or necessary to prove or
illustrate several parts of the same discourse, and that so it has
happened in many parts of this: but waiving that, I shall frankly avow
that I have sometimes dwelt long upon the same argument, and expressed
it different ways, with a quite different design. I pretend not to
publish this Essay for the information of men of large thoughts and
quick apprehensions; to such masters of knowledge I profess myself a
scholar, and therefore warn them beforehand not to expect anything
here, but what, being spun out of my own coarse thoughts, is fitted to
men of my own size, to whom, perhaps, it will not be unacceptable that
I have taken some pains to make plain and familiar to their thoughts
some truths which established prejudice, or the abstractedness of the
ideas themselves, might render difficult. Some objects had need be
turned on every side; and when the notion is new, as I confess some of
these are to me; or out of the ordinary road, as I suspect they will
appear to others, it is not one simple view of it that will gain it
admittance into every understanding, or fix it there with a clear and
lasting impression. There are few, I believe, who have not observed in
themselves or others, that what in one way of proposing was very
obscure, another way of expressing it has made very clear and
intelligible; though afterwards the mind found little difference in the
phrases, and wondered why one failed to be understood more than the
other. But everything does not hit alike upon every man’s imagination.
We have our understandings no less different than our palates; and he
that thinks the same truth shall be equally relished by every one in
the same dress, may as well hope to feast every one with the same sort
of cookery: the meat may be the same, and the nourishment good, yet
every one not be able to receive it with that seasoning; and it must be
dressed another way, if you will have it go down with some, even of
strong constitutions. The truth is, those who advised me to publish it,
advised me, for this reason, to publish it as it is: and since I have
been brought to let it go abroad, I desire it should be understood by
whoever gives himself the pains to read it. I have so little affection
to be in print, that if I were not flattered this Essay might be of
some use to others, as I think it has been to me, I should have
confined it to the view of some friends, who gave the first occasion to
it. My appearing therefore in print being on purpose to be as useful as
I may, I think it necessary to make what I have to say as easy and
intelligible to all sorts of readers as I can. And I had much rather
the speculative and quick-sighted should complain of my being in some
parts tedious, than that any one, not accustomed to abstract
speculations, or prepossessed with different notions, should mistake or
not comprehend my meaning.
It will possibly be censured as a great piece of vanity or insolence in
me, to pretend to instruct this our knowing age; it amounting to little
less, when I own, that I publish this Essay with hopes it may be useful
to others. But, if it may be permitted to speak freely of those who
with a feigned modesty condemn as useless what they themselves write,
methinks it savours much more of vanity or insolence to publish a book
for any other end; and he fails very much of that respect he owes the
public, who prints, and consequently expects men should read, that
wherein he intends not they should meet with anything of use to
themselves or others: and should nothing else be found allowable in
this Treatise, yet my design will not cease to be so; and the goodness
of my intention ought to be some excuse for the worthlessness of my
present. It is that chiefly which secures me from the fear of censure,
which I expect not to escape more than better writers. Men’s
principles, notions, and relishes are so different, that it is hard to
find a book which pleases or displeases all men. I acknowledge the age
we live in is not the least knowing, and therefore not the most easy to
be satisfied. If I have not the good luck to please, yet nobody ought
to be offended with me. I plainly tell all my readers, except half a
dozen, this Treatise was not at first intended for them; and therefore
they need not be at the trouble to be of that number. But yet if any
one thinks fit to be angry and rail at it, he may do it securely, for I
shall find some better way of spending my time than in such kind of
conversation. I shall always have the satisfaction to have aimed
sincerely at truth and usefulness, though in one of the meanest ways.
The commonwealth of learning is not at this time without
master-builders, whose mighty designs, in advancing the sciences, will
leave lasting monuments to the admiration of posterity: but every one
must not hope to be a Boyle or a Sydenham; and in an age that produces
such masters as the great Huygenius and the incomparable Mr. Newton,
with some others of that strain, it is ambition enough to be employed
as an under-labourer in clearing the ground a little, and removing some
of the rubbish that lies in the way to knowledge;—which certainly had
been very much more advanced in the world, if the endeavours of
ingenious and industrious men had not been much cumbered with the
learned but frivolous use of uncouth, affected, or unintelligible
terms, introduced into the sciences, and there made an art of, to that
degree that Philosophy, which is nothing but the true knowledge of
things, was thought unfit or incapable to be brought into well-bred
company and polite conversation. Vague and insignificant forms of
speech, and abuse of language, have so long passed for mysteries of
science; and hard and misapplied words, with little or no meaning,
have, by prescription, such a right to be mistaken for deep learning
and height of speculation, that it will not be easy to persuade either
those who speak or those who hear them, that they are but the covers of
ignorance, and hindrance of true knowledge. To break in upon the
sanctuary of vanity and ignorance will be, I suppose, some service to
human understanding; though so few are apt to think they deceive or are
deceived in the use of words; or that the language of the sect they are
of has any faults in it which ought to be examined or corrected, that I
hope I shall be pardoned if I have in the Third Book dwelt long on this
subject, and endeavoured to make it so plain, that neither the
inveterateness of the mischief, nor the prevalency of the fashion,
shall be any excuse for those who will not take care about the meaning
of their own words, and will not suffer the significancy of their
expressions to be inquired into.
I have been told that a short Epitome of this Treatise, which was
printed in 1688, was by some condemned without reading, because INNATE
IDEAS were denied in it; they too hastily concluding, that if innate
ideas were not supposed, there would be little left either of the
notion or proof of spirits. If any one take the like offence at the
entrance of this Treatise, I shall desire him to read it through; and
then I hope he will be convinced, that the taking away false
foundations is not to the prejudice but advantage of truth, which is
never injured or endangered so much as when mixed with, or built on,
falsehood. In the Second Edition I added as followeth:—
The bookseller will not forgive me if I say nothing of this New
Edition, which he has promised, by the correctness of it, shall make
amends for the many faults committed in the former. He desires too,
that it should be known that it has one whole new chapter concerning
Identity, and many additions and amendments in other places. These I
must inform my reader are not all new matter, but most of them either
further confirmation of what I had said, or explications, to prevent
others being mistaken in the sense of what was formerly printed, and
not any variation in me from it.
I must only except the alterations I have made in Book II. chap. xxi.
What I had there written concerning Liberty and the Will, I thought
deserved as accurate a view as I am capable of; those subjects having
in all ages exercised the learned part of the world with questions and
difficulties, that have not a little perplexed morality and divinity,
those parts of knowledge that men are most concerned to be clear in.
Upon a closer inspection into the working of men’s minds, and a
stricter examination of those motives and views they are turned by, I
have found reason somewhat to alter the thoughts I formerly had
concerning that which gives the last determination to the Will in all
voluntary actions. This I cannot forbear to acknowledge to the world
with as much freedom and readiness; as I at first published what then
seemed to me to be right; thinking myself more concerned to quit and
renounce any opinion of my own, than oppose that of another, when truth
appears against it. For it is truth alone I seek, and that will always
be welcome to me, when or from whencesoever it comes. But what
forwardness soever I have to resign any opinion I have, or to recede
from anything I have writ, upon the first evidence of any error in it;
yet this I must own, that I have not had the good luck to receive any
light from those exceptions I have met with in print against any part
of my book, nor have, from anything that has been urged against it,
found reason to alter my sense in any of the points that have been
questioned. Whether the subject I have in hand requires often more
thought and attention than cursory readers, at least such as are
prepossessed, are willing to allow; or whether any obscurity in my
expressions casts a cloud over it, and these notions are made difficult
to others’ apprehensions in my way of treating them; so it is, that my
meaning, I find, is often mistaken, and I have not the good luck to be
everywhere rightly understood.
Of this the ingenious author of the Discourse Concerning the Nature of
Man has given me a late instance, to mention no other. For the civility
of his expressions, and the candour that belongs to his order, forbid
me to think that he would have closed his Preface with an insinuation,
as if in what I had said, Book II. ch. xxvii, concerning the third rule
which men refer their actions to, I went about to make virtue vice and
vice virtue, unless he had mistaken my meaning; which he could not have
done if he had given himself the trouble to consider what the argument
was I was then upon, and what was the chief design of that chapter,
plainly enough set down in the fourth section and those following. For
I was there not laying down moral rules, but showing the original and
nature of moral ideas, and enumerating the rules men make use of in
moral relations, whether these rules were true or false: and pursuant
thereto I tell what is everywhere called virtue and vice; which “alters
not the nature of things,” though men generally do judge of and
denominate their actions according to the esteem and fashion of the
place and sect they are of.
If he had been at the pains to reflect on what I had said, Bk. I. ch.
ii. sect. 18, and Bk. II. ch. xxviii. sect. 13, 14, 15 and 20, he would
have known what I think of the eternal and unalterable nature of right
and wrong, and what I call virtue and vice. And if he had observed that
in the place he quotes I only report as a matter of fact what OTHERS
call virtue and vice, he would not have found it liable to any great
exception. For I think I am not much out in saying that one of the
rules made use of in the world for a ground or measure of a moral
relation is—that esteem and reputation which several sorts of actions
find variously in the several societies of men, according to which they
are there called virtues or vices. And whatever authority the learned
Mr. Lowde places in his Old English Dictionary, I daresay it nowhere
tells him (if I should appeal to it) that the same action is not in
credit, called and counted a virtue, in one place, which, being in
disrepute, passes for and under the name of vice in another. The taking
notice that men bestow the names of ‘virtue’ and ‘vice’ according to
this rule of Reputation is all I have done, or can be laid to my charge
to have done, towards the making vice virtue or virtue vice. But the
good man does well, and as becomes his calling, to be watchful in such
points, and to take the alarm even at expressions, which, standing
alone by themselves, might sound ill and be suspected.
‘Tis to this zeal, allowable in his function, that I forgive his citing
as he does these words of mine (ch. xxviii. sect. II): “Even the
exhortations of inspired teachers have not feared to appeal to common
repute, Philip, iv. 8;” without taking notice of those immediately
preceding, which introduce them, and run thus: “Whereby even in the
corruption of manners, the true boundaries of the law of nature, which
ought to be the rule of virtue and vice, were pretty well preserved. So
that even the exhortations of inspired teachers,” &c. By which words,
and the rest of that section, it is plain that I brought that passage
of St. Paul, not to prove that the general measure of what men called
virtue and vice throughout the world was the reputation and fashion of
each particular society within itself; but to show that, though it were
so, yet, for reasons I there give, men, in that way of denominating
their actions, did not for the most part much stray from the Law of
Nature; which is that standing and unalterable rule by which they ought
to judge of the moral rectitude and gravity of their actions, and
accordingly denominate them virtues or vices. Had Mr. Lowde considered
this, he would have found it little to his purpose to have quoted this
passage in a sense I used it not; and would I imagine have spared the
application he subjoins to it, as not very necessary. But I hope this
Second Edition will give him satisfaction on the point, and that this
matter is now so expressed as to show him there was no cause for
scruple.
Though I am forced to differ from him in these apprehensions he has
expressed, in the latter end of his preface, concerning what I had said
about virtue and vice, yet we are better agreed than he thinks in what
he says in his third chapter (p. 78) concerning “natural inscription
and innate notions.” I shall not deny him the privilege he claims (p.
52), to state the question as he pleases, especially when he states it
so as to leave nothing in it contrary to what I have said. For,
according to him, “innate notions, being conditional things, depending
upon the concurrence of several other circumstances in order to the
soul’s exerting them,” all that he says for “innate, imprinted,
impressed notions” (for of innate IDEAS he says nothing at all),
amounts at last only to this—that there are certain propositions which,
though the soul from the beginning, or when a man is born, does not
know, yet “by assistance from the outward senses, and the help of some
previous cultivation,” it may AFTERWARDS come certainly to know the
truth of; which is no more than what I have affirmed in my First Book.
For I suppose by the “soul’s exerting them,” he means its beginning to
know them; or else the soul’s ‘exerting of notions’ will be to me a
very unintelligible expression; and I think at best is a very unfit one
in this, it misleading men’s thoughts by an insinuation, as if these
notions were in the mind before the ‘soul exerts them,’ i. e. before
they are known;—whereas truly before they are known, there is nothing
of them in the mind but a capacity to know them, when the ‘concurrence
of those circumstances,’ which this ingenious author thinks necessary
‘in order to the soul’s exerting them,’ brings them into our knowledge.
P. 52 I find him express it thus: ‘These natural notions are not so
imprinted upon the soul as that they naturally and necessarily exert
themselves (even in children and idiots) without any assistance from
the outward senses, or without the help of some previous cultivation.’
Here, he says, they ‘exert themselves,’ as p. 78, that the ‘soul exerts
them.’ When he has explained to himself or others what he means by ‘the
soul’s exerting innate notions,’ or their ‘exerting themselves;’ and
what that ‘previous cultivation and circumstances’ in order to their
being exerted are—he will I suppose find there is so little of
controversy between him and me on the point, bating that he calls that
‘exerting of notions’ which I in a more vulgar style call ‘knowing,’
that I have reason to think he brought in my name on this occasion only
out of the pleasure he has to speak civilly of me; which I must
gratefully acknowledge he has done everywhere he mentions me, not
without conferring on me, as some others have done, a title I have no
right to.
There are so many instances of this, that I think it justice to my
reader and myself to conclude, that either my book is plainly enough
written to be rightly understood by those who peruse it with that
attention and indifferency, which every one who will give himself the
pains to read ought to employ in reading; or else that I have written
mine so obscurely that it is in vain to go about to mend it. Whichever
of these be the truth, it is myself only am affected thereby; and
therefore I shall be far from troubling my reader with what I think
might be said in answer to those several objections I have met with, to
passages here and there of my book; since I persuade myself that he who
thinks them of moment enough to be concerned whether they are true or
false, will be able to see that what is said is either not well
founded, or else not contrary to my doctrine, when I and my opposer
come both to be well understood.
If any other authors, careful that none of their good thoughts should
be lost, have published their censures of my Essay, with this honour
done to it, that they will not suffer it to be an essay, I leave it to
the public to value the obligation they have to their critical pens,
and shall not waste my reader’s time in so idle or ill-natured an
employment of mine, as to lessen the satisfaction any one has in
himself, or gives to others, in so hasty a confutation of what I have
written.
The booksellers preparing for the Fourth Edition of my Essay, gave me
notice of it, that I might, if I had leisure, make any additions or
alterations I should think fit. Whereupon I thought it convenient to
advertise the reader, that besides several corrections I had made here
and there, there was one alteration which it was necessary to mention,
because it ran through the whole book, and is of consequence to be
rightly understood. What I thereupon said was this:—
CLEAR and DISTINCT ideas are terms which, though familiar and frequent
in men’s mouths, I have reason to think every one who uses does not
perfectly understand. And possibly ‘tis but here and there one who
gives himself the trouble to consider them so far as to know what he
himself or others precisely mean by them. I have therefore in most
places chose to put DETERMINATE or DETERMINED, instead of CLEAR and
DISTINCT, as more likely to direct men’s thoughts to my meaning in this
matter. By those denominations, I mean some object in the mind, and
consequently determined, i. e. such as it is there seen and perceived
to be. This, I think, may fitly be called a determinate or determined
idea, when such as it is at any time objectively in the mind, and so
determined there, it is annexed, and without variation determined, to a
name or articulate sound, which is to be steadily the sign of that very
same object of the mind, or determinate idea.
To explain this a little more particularly. By DETERMINATE, when
applied to a simple idea, I mean that simple appearance which the mind
has in its view, or perceives in itself, when that idea is said to be
in it: by DETERMINED, when applied to a complex idea, I mean such an
one as consists of a determinate number of certain simple or less
complex ideas, joined in such a proportion and situation as the mind
has before its view, and sees in itself, when that idea is present in
it, or should be present in it, when a man gives a name to it. I say
SHOULD be, because it is not every one, nor perhaps any one, who is so
careful of his language as to use no word till he views in his mind the
precise determined idea which he resolves to make it the sign of. The
want of this is the cause of no small obscurity and confusion in men’s
thoughts and discourses.
I know there are not words enough in any language to answer all the
variety of ideas that enter into men’s discourses and reasonings. But
this hinders not but that when any one uses any term, he may have in
his mind a determined idea, which he makes it the sign of, and to which
he should keep it steadily annexed during that present discourse. Where
he does not, or cannot do this, he in vain pretends to clear or
distinct ideas: it is plain his are not so; and therefore there can be
expected nothing but obscurity and confusion, where such terms are made
use of which have not such a precise determination.
Upon this ground I have thought determined ideas a way of speaking less
liable to mistakes, than clear and distinct: and where men have got
such determined ideas of all that they reason, inquire, or argue about,
they will find a great part of their doubts and disputes at an end; the
greatest part of the questions and controversies that perplex mankind
depending on the doubtful and uncertain use of words, or (which is the
same) indetermined ideas, which they are made to stand for. I have made
choice of these terms to signify, (1) Some immediate object of the
mind, which it perceives and has before it, distinct from the sound it
uses as a sign of it. (2) That this idea, thus determined, i.e. which
the mind has in itself, and knows, and sees there, be determined
without any change to that name, and that name determined to that
precise idea. If men had such determined ideas in their inquiries and
discourses, they would both discern how far their own inquiries and
discourses went, and avoid the greatest part of the disputes and
wranglings they have with others.
Besides this, the bookseller will think it necessary I should advertise
the reader that there is an addition of two chapters wholly new; the
one of the Association of Ideas, the other of Enthusiasm. These, with
some other larger additions never before printed, he has engaged to
print by themselves, after the same manner, and for the same purpose,
as was done when this Essay had the second impression.
In the Sixth Edition there is very little added or altered. The
greatest part of what is new is contained in the twenty-first chapter
of the second book, which any one, if he thinks it worth while, may,
with a very little labour, transcribe into the margin of the former
edition.
ESSAY CONCERNING HUMANE UNDERSTANDING.
BOOK I
NEITHER PRINCIPLES NOR IDEAS ARE INNATE
CHAPTER I.
INTRODUCTION.
1. An Inquiry into the Understanding pleasant and useful.
Since it is the UNDERSTANDING that sets man above the rest of sensible
beings, and gives him all the advantage and dominion which he has over
them; it is certainly a subject, even for its nobleness, worth our
labour to inquire into. The understanding, like the eye, whilst it
makes us see and perceive all other things, takes no notice of itself;
and it requires and art and pains to set it at a distance and make it
its own object. But whatever be the difficulties that lie in the way of
this inquiry; whatever it be that keeps us so much in the dark to
ourselves; sure I am that all the light we can let in upon our minds,
all the acquaintance we can make with our own understandings, will not
only be very pleasant, but bring us great advantage, in directing our
thoughts in the search of other things.
2. Design.
This, therefore, being my purpose—to inquire into the original,
certainty, and extent of HUMAN KNOWLEDGE, together with the grounds and
degrees of BELIEF, OPINION, and ASSENT;—I shall not at present meddle
with the physical consideration of the mind; or trouble myself to
examine wherein its essence consists; or by what motions of our spirits
or alterations of our bodies we come to have any SENSATION by our
organs, or any IDEAS in our understandings; and whether those ideas do
in their formation, any or all of them, depend on matter or not. These
are speculations which, however curious and entertaining, I shall
decline, as lying out of my way in the design I am now upon. It shall
suffice to my present purpose, to consider the discerning faculties of
a man, as they are employed about the objects which they have to do
with. And I shall imagine I have not wholly misemployed myself in the
thoughts I shall have on this occasion, if, in this historical, plain
method, I can give any account of the ways whereby our understandings
come to attain those notions of things we have; and can set down any
measures of the certainty of our knowledge; or the grounds of those
persuasions which are to be found amongst men, so various, different,
and wholly contradictory; and yet asserted somewhere or other with such
assurance and confidence, that he that shall take a view of the
opinions of mankind, observe their opposition, and at the same time
consider the fondness and devotion wherewith they are embraced, the
resolution and eagerness wherewith they are maintained, may perhaps
have reason to suspect, that either there is no such thing as truth at
all, or that mankind hath no sufficient means to attain a certain
knowledge of it.
3. Method.
It is therefore worth while to search out the bounds between opinion
and knowledge; and examine by what measures, in things whereof we have
no certain knowledge, we ought to regulate our assent and moderate our
persuasion. In order whereunto I shall pursue this following method:—
First, I shall inquire into the original of those ideas, notions, or
whatever else you please to call them, which a man observes, and is
conscious to himself he has in his mind; and the ways whereby the
understanding comes to be furnished with them.
Secondly, I shall endeavour to show what knowledge the understanding
hath by those ideas; and the certainty, evidence, and extent of it.
Thirdly, I shall make some inquiry into the nature and grounds of FAITH
or OPINION: whereby I mean that assent which we give to any proposition
as true, of whose truth yet we have no certain knowledge. And here we
shall have occasion to examine the reasons and degrees of ASSENT.
4. Useful to know the Extent of our Comprehension.
If by this inquiry into the nature of the understanding, I can discover
the powers thereof; how far they reach; to what things they are in any
degree proportionate; and where they fail us, I suppose it may be of
use to prevail with the busy mind of man to be more cautious in
meddling with things exceeding its comprehension; to stop when it is at
the utmost extent of its tether; and to sit down in a quiet ignorance
of those things which, upon examination, are found to be beyond the
reach of our capacities. We should not then perhaps be so forward, out
of an affectation of an universal knowledge, to raise questions, and
perplex ourselves and others with disputes about things to which our
understandings are not suited; and of which we cannot frame in our
minds any clear or distinct perceptions, or whereof (as it has perhaps
too often happened) we have not any notions at all. If we can find out
how far the understanding can extend its view; how far it has faculties
to attain certainty; and in what cases it can only judge and guess, we
may learn to content ourselves with what is attainable by us in this
state.
5. Our Capacity suited to our State and Concerns.
For though the comprehension of our understandings comes exceeding
short of the vast extent of things, yet we shall have cause enough to
magnify the bountiful Author of our being, for that proportion and
degree of knowledge he has bestowed on us, so far above all the rest of
the inhabitants of this our mansion. Men have reason to be well
satisfied with what God hath thought fit for them, since he hath given
them (as St. Peter says) [words in Greek], whatsoever is necessary for
the conveniences of life and information of virtue; and has put within
the reach of their discovery, the comfortable provision for this life,
and the way that leads to a better. How short soever their knowledge
may come of an universal or perfect comprehension of whatsoever is, it
yet secures their great concernments, that they have light enough to
lead them to the knowledge of their Maker, and the sight of their own
duties. Men may find matter sufficient to busy their heads, and employ
their hands with variety, delight, and satisfaction, if they will not
boldly quarrel with their own constitution, and throw away the
blessings their hands are filled with, because they are not big enough
to grasp everything. We shall not have much reason to complain of the
narrowness of our minds, if we will but employ them about what may be
of use to us; for of that they are very capable. And it will be an
unpardonable, as well as childish peevishness, if we undervalue the
advantages of our knowledge, and neglect to improve it to the ends for
which it was given us, because there are some things that are set out
of the reach of it. It will be no excuse to an idle and untoward
servant, who would not attend his business by candle light, to plead
that he had not broad sunshine. The Candle that is set up in us shines
bright enough for all our purposes. The discoveries we can make with
this ought to satisfy us; and we shall then use our understandings
right, when we entertain all objects in that way and proportion that
they are suited to our faculties, and upon those grounds they are
capable of being proposed to us; and not peremptorily or intemperately
require demonstration, and demand certainty, where probability only is
to be had, and which is sufficient to govern all our concernments. If
we will disbelieve everything, because we cannot certainly know all
things, we shall do much—what as wisely as he who would not use his
legs, but sit still and perish, because he had no wings to fly.
6. Knowledge of our Capacity a Cure of Scepticism and Idleness.
When we know our own strength, we shall the better know what to
undertake with hopes of success; and when we have well surveyed the
POWERS of our own minds, and made some estimate what we may expect from
them, we shall not be inclined either to sit still, and not set our
thoughts on work at all, in despair of knowing anything; nor on the
other side, question everything, and disclaim all knowledge, because
some things are not to be understood. It is of great use to the sailor
to know the length of his line, though he cannot with it fathom all the
depths of the ocean. It is well he knows that it is long enough to
reach the bottom, at such places as are necessary to direct his voyage,
and caution him against running upon shoals that may ruin him. Our
business here is not to know all things, but those which concern our
conduct. If we can find out those measures, whereby a rational
creature, put in that state in which man is in this world, may and
ought to govern his opinions, and actions depending thereon, we need
not to be troubled that some other things escape our knowledge.
7. Occasion of this Essay.
This was that which gave the first rise to this Essay concerning the
understanding. For I thought that the first step towards satisfying
several inquiries the mind of man was very apt to run into, was, to
take a survey of our own understandings, examine our own powers, and
see to what things they were adapted. Till that was done I suspected we
began at the wrong end, and in vain sought for satisfaction in a quiet
and sure possession of truths that most concerned us, whilst we let
loose our thoughts into the vast ocean of Being; as if all that
boundless extent were the natural and undoubted possession of our
understandings, wherein there was nothing exempt from its decisions, or
that escaped its comprehension. Thus men, extending their inquiries
beyond their capacities, and letting their thoughts wander into those
depths where they can find no sure footing, it is no wonder that they
raise questions and multiply disputes, which, never coming to any clear
resolution, are proper only to continue and increase their doubts, and
to confirm them at last in perfect scepticism. Whereas, were the
capacities of our understandings well considered, the extent of our
knowledge once discovered, and the horizon found which sets the bounds
between the enlightened and dark parts of things; between what is and
what is not comprehensible by us, men would perhaps with less scruple
acquiesce in the avowed ignorance of the one, and employ their thoughts
and discourse with more advantage and satisfaction in the other.
8. What Idea stands for.
Thus much I thought necessary to say concerning the occasion of this
inquiry into human Understanding. But, before I proceed on to what I
have thought on this subject, I must here in the entrance beg pardon of
my reader for the frequent use of the word IDEA, which he will find in
the following treatise. It being that term which, I think, serves best
to stand for whatsoever is the OBJECT of the understanding when a man
thinks, I have used it to express whatever is meant by PHANTASM,
NOTION, SPECIES, or WHATEVER IT IS WHICH THE MIND CAN BE EMPLOYED ABOUT
IN THINKING; and I could not avoid frequently using it. I presume it
will be easily granted me, that there are such IDEAS in men’s minds:
every one is conscious of them in himself; and men’s words and actions
will satisfy him that they are in others.
Our first inquiry then shall be,—how they come into the mind.
CHAPTER II.
NO INNATE SPECULATIVE PRINCIPLES.
1. The way shown how we come by any Knowledge, sufficient to prove it
not innate.
It is an established opinion amongst some men, that there are in the
understanding certain INNATE PRINCIPLES; some primary notions, Κοινὰι
εὔνοιαι, characters, as it were stamped upon the mind of man; which the
soul receives in its very first being, and brings into the world with
it. It would be sufficient to convince unprejudiced readers of the
falseness of this supposition, if I should only show (as I hope I shall
in the following parts of this Discourse) how men, barely by the use of
their natural faculties may attain to all the knowledge they have,
without the help of any innate impressions; and may arrive at
certainty, without any such original notions or principles. For I
imagine any one will easily grant that it would be impertinent to
suppose the ideas of colours innate in a creature to whom God hath
given sight, and a power to receive them by the eyes from external
objects: and no less unreasonable would it be to attribute several
truths to the impressions of nature, and innate characters, when we may
observe in ourselves faculties fit to attain as easy and certain
knowledge of them as if they were originally imprinted on the mind.
But because a man is not permitted without censure to follow his own
thoughts in the search of truth, when they lead him ever so little out
of the common road, I shall set down the reasons that made me doubt of
the truth of that opinion, as an excuse for my mistake, if I be in one;
which I leave to be considered by those who, with me, dispose
themselves to embrace truth wherever they find it.
2. General Assent the great Argument.
There is nothing more commonly taken for granted than that there are
certain PRINCIPLES, both SPECULATIVE and PRACTICAL, (for they speak of
both), universally agreed upon by all mankind: which therefore, they
argue, must needs be the constant impressions which the souls of men
receive in their first beings, and which they bring into the world with
them, as necessarily and really as they do any of their inherent
faculties.
3. Universal Consent proves nothing innate.
This argument, drawn from universal consent, has this misfortune in it,
that if it were true in matter of fact, that there were certain truths
wherein all mankind agreed, it would not prove them innate, if there
can be any other way shown how men may come to that universal
agreement, in the things they do consent in, which I presume may be
done.
4. “What is is,” and “It is possible for the same Thing to be and not
to be,” not universally assented to.
But, which is worse, this argument of universal consent, which is made
use of to prove innate principles, seems to me a demonstration that
there are none such: because there are none to which all mankind give
an universal assent. I shall begin with the speculative, and instance
in those magnified principles of demonstration, “Whatsoever is, is,”
and “It is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be”; which,
of all others, I think have the most allowed title to innate. These
have so settled a reputation of maxims universally received, that it
will no doubt be thought strange if any one should seem to question it.
But yet I take liberty to say, that these propositions are so far from
having an universal assent, that there are a great part of mankind to
whom they are not so much as known.
5. Not on Mind naturally imprinted, because not known to Children,
Idiots, &c.
For, first, it is evident, that all children and idiots have not the
least apprehension or thought of them. And the want of that is enough
to destroy that universal assent which must needs be the necessary
concomitant of all innate truths: it seeming to me near a contradiction
to say, that there are truths imprinted on the soul, which it perceives
or understands not: imprinting, if it signify anything, being nothing
else but the making certain truths to be perceived. For to imprint
anything on the mind without the mind’s perceiving it, seems to me
hardly intelligible. If therefore children and idiots have souls, have
minds, with those impressions upon them, THEY must unavoidably perceive
them, and necessarily know and assent to these truths; which since they
do not, it is evident that there are no such impressions. For if they
are not notions naturally imprinted, how can they be innate? and if
they are notions imprinted, how can they be unknown? To say a notion is
imprinted on the mind, and yet at the same time to say, that the mind
is ignorant of it, and never yet took notice of it, is to make this
impression nothing. No proposition can be said to be in the mind which
it never yet knew, which it was never yet conscious of. For if any one
may, then, by the same reason, all propositions that are true, and the
mind is capable ever of assenting to, may be said to be in the mind,
and to be imprinted: since, if any one can be said to be in the mind,
which it never yet knew, it must be only because it is capable of
knowing it; and so the mind is of all truths it ever shall know. Nay,
thus truths may be imprinted on the mind which it never did, nor ever
shall know; for a man may live long, and die at last in ignorance of
many truths which his mind was capable of knowing, and that with
certainty. So that if the capacity of knowing be the natural impression
contended for, all the truths a man ever comes to know will, by this
account, be every one of them innate; and this great point will amount
to no more, but only to a very improper way of speaking; which, whilst
it pretends to assert the contrary, says nothing different from those
who deny innate principles. For nobody, I think, ever denied that the
mind was capable of knowing several truths. The capacity, they say, is
innate; the knowledge acquired. But then to what end such contest for
certain innate maxims? If truths can be imprinted on the understanding
without being perceived, I can see no difference there can be between
any truths the mind is CAPABLE of knowing in respect of their original:
they must all be innate or all adventitious: in vain shall a man go
about to distinguish them. He therefore that talks of innate notions in
the understanding, cannot (if he intend thereby any distinct sort of
truths) mean such truths to be in the understanding as it never
perceived, and is yet wholly ignorant of. For if these words “to be in
the understanding” have any propriety, they signify to be understood.
So that to be in the understanding, and not to be understood; to be in
the mind and never to be perceived, is all one as to say anything is
and is not in the mind or understanding. If therefore these two
propositions, “Whatsoever is, is,” and “It is impossible for the same
thing to be and not to be,” are by nature imprinted, children cannot be
ignorant of them: infants, and all that have souls, must necessarily
have them in their understandings, know the truth of them, and assent
to it.
6. That men know them when they come to the Use of Reason answered.
To avoid this, it is usually answered, that all men know and assent to
them, WHEN THEY COME TO THE USE OF REASON; and this is enough to prove
them innate. I answer:
7. Doubtful expressions, that have scarce any signification, go for
clear reasons to those who, being prepossessed, take not the pains to
examine even what they themselves say. For, to apply this answer with
any tolerable sense to our present purpose, it must signify one of
these two things: either that as soon as men come to the use of reason
these supposed native inscriptions come to be known and observed by
them; or else, that the use and exercise of men’s reason, assists them
in the discovery of these principles, and certainly makes them known to
them.
8. If Reason discovered them, that would not prove them innate.
If they mean, that by the use of reason men may discover these
principles, and that this is sufficient to prove them innate; their way
of arguing will stand thus, viz. that whatever truths reason can
certainly discover to us, and make us firmly assent to, those are all
naturally imprinted on the mind; since that universal assent, which is
made the mark of them, amounts to no more but this,—that by the use of
reason we are capable to come to a certain knowledge of and assent to
them; and, by this means, there will be no difference between the
maxims of the mathematicians, and theorems they deduce from them: all
must be equally allowed innate; they being all discoveries made by the
use of reason, and truths that a rational creature may certainly come
to know, if he apply his thoughts rightly that way.
9. It is false that Reason discovers them.
But how can these men think the use of reason necessary to discover
principles that are supposed innate, when reason (if we may believe
them) is nothing else but the faculty of deducing unknown truths from
principles or propositions that are already known? That certainly can
never be thought innate which we have need of reason to discover;
unless, as I have said, we will have all the certain truths that reason
ever teaches us, to be innate. We may as well think the use of reason
necessary to make our eyes discover visible objects, as that there
should be need of reason, or the exercise thereof, to make the
understanding see what is originally engraven on it, and cannot be in
the understanding before it be perceived by it. So that to make reason
discover those truths thus imprinted, is to say, that the use of reason
discovers to a man what he knew before: and if men have those innate
impressed truths originally, and before the use of reason, and yet are
always ignorant of them till they come to the use of reason, it is in
effect to say, that men know and know them not at the same time.
10. No use made of reasoning in the discovery of these two maxims.
It will here perhaps be said that mathematical demonstrations, and
other truths that are not innate, are not assented to as soon as
proposed, wherein they are distinguished from these maxims and other
innate truths. I shall have occasion to speak of assent upon the first
proposing, more particularly by and by. I shall here only, and that
very readily, allow, that these maxims and mathematical demonstrations
are in this different: that the one have need of reason, using of
proofs, to make them out and to gain our assent; but the other, as soon
as understood, are, without any the least reasoning, embraced and
assented to. But I withal beg leave to observe, that it lays open the
weakness of this subterfuge, which requires the use of reason for the
discovery of these general truths: since it must be confessed that in
their discovery there is no use made of reasoning at all. And I think
those who give this answer will not be forward to affirm that the
knowledge of this maxim, “That it is impossible for the same thing to
be and not to be,” is a deduction of our reason. For this would be to
destroy that bounty of nature they seem so fond of, whilst they make
the knowledge of those principles to depend on the labour of our
thoughts. For all reasoning is search, and casting about, and requires
pains and application. And how can it with any tolerable sense be
supposed, that what was imprinted by nature, as the foundation and
guide of our reason, should need the use of reason to discover it?
11. And if there were this would prove them not innate.
Those who will take the pains to reflect with a little attention on the
operations of the understanding, will find that this ready assent of
the mind to some truths, depends not, either on native inscription, or
the use of reason, but on a faculty of the mind quite distinct from
both of them, as we shall see hereafter. Reason, therefore, having
nothing to do in procuring our assent to these maxims, if by saying,
that “men know and assent to them, when they come to the use of
reason,” be meant, that the use of reason assists us in the knowledge
of these maxims, it is utterly false; and were it true, would prove
them not to be innate.
12. The coming of the Use of Reason not the Time we come to know these
Maxims.
If by knowing and assenting to them “when we come to the use of
reason,” be meant, that this is the time when they come to be taken
notice of by the mind; and that as soon as children come to the use of
reason, they come also to know and assent to these maxims; this also is
false and frivolous. First, it is false; because it is evident these
maxims are not in the mind so early as the use of reason; and therefore
the coming to the use of reason is falsely assigned as the time of
their discovery. How many instances of the use of reason may we observe
in children, a long time before they have any knowledge of this maxim,
“That it is impossible for the same thing to be and not to be?” And a
great part of illiterate people and savages pass many years, even of
their rational age, without ever thinking on this and the like general
propositions. I grant, men come not to the knowledge of these general
and more abstract truths, which are thought innate, till they come to
the use of reason; and I add, nor then neither. Which is so, because,
till after they come to the use of reason, those general abstract ideas
are not framed in the mind, about which those general maxims are, which
are mistaken for innate principles, but are indeed discoveries made and
verities introduced and brought into the mind by the same way, and
discovered by the same steps, as several other propositions, which
nobody was ever so extravagant as to suppose innate. This I hope to
make plain in the sequel of this Discourse. I allow therefore, a
necessity that men should come to the use of reason before they get the
knowledge of those general truths; but deny that men’s coming to the
use of reason is the time of their discovery.
13. By this they are not distinguished from other knowable Truths.
In the mean time it is observable, that this saying that men know and
assent to these maxims “when they come to the use of reason,” amounts
in reality of fact to no more but this,—that they are never known nor
taken notice of before the use of reason, but may possibly be assented
to some time after, during a man’s life; but when is uncertain. And so
may all other knowable truths, as well as these which therefore have no
advantage nor distinction from other by this note of being known when
we come to the use of reason; nor are thereby proved to be innate, but
quite the contrary.
14. If coming to the Use of Reason were the Time of their Discovery, it
would not prove them innate.
But, secondly, were it true that the precise time of their being known
and assented to were, when men come to the use of reason; neither would
that prove them innate. This way of arguing is as frivolous as the
supposition itself is false. For, by what kind of logic will it appear
that any notion is originally by nature imprinted in the mind in its
first constitution, because it comes first to be observed and assented
to when a faculty of the mind, which has quite a distinct province,
begins to exert itself? And therefore the coming to the use of speech,
if it were supposed the time that these maxims are first assented to,
(which it may be with as much truth as the time when men come to the
use of reason,) would be as good a proof that they were innate, as to
say they are innate because men assent to them when they come to the
use of reason. I agree then with these men of innate principles, that
there is no knowledge of these general and self-evident maxims in the
mind, till it comes to the exercise of reason: but I deny that the
coming to the use of reason is the precise time when they are first
taken notice of; and if that were the precise time, I deny that it
would prove them innate. All that can with any truth be meant by this
proposition, that men ‘assent to them when they come to the use of
reason,’ is no more but this,—that the making of general abstract
ideas, and the understanding of general names, being a concomitant of
the rational faculty, and growing up with it, children commonly get not
those general ideas, nor learn the names that stand for them, till,
having for a good while exercised their reason about familiar and more
particular ideas, they are, by their ordinary discourse and actions
with others, acknowledged to be capable of rational conversation. If
assenting to these maxims, when men come to the use of reason, can be
true in any other sense, I desire it may be shown; or at least, how in
this, or any other sense, it proves them innate.
15. The Steps by which the Mind attains several Truths.
The senses at first let in PARTICULAR ideas, and furnish the yet empty
cabinet, and the mind by degrees growing familiar with some of them,
they are lodged in the memory, and names got to them. Afterwards, the
mind proceeding further, abstracts them, and by degrees learns the use
of general names. In this manner the mind comes to be furnished with
ideas and language, the MATERIALS about which to exercise its
discursive faculty. And the use of reason becomes daily more visible,
as these materials that give it employment increase. But though the
having of general ideas and the use of general words and reason usually
grow together, yet I see not how this any way proves them innate. The
knowledge of some truths, I confess, is very early in the mind; but in
a way that shows them not to be innate. For, if we will observe, we
shall find it still to be about ideas, not innate, but acquired; it
being about those first which are imprinted by external things, with
which infants have earliest to do, which make the most frequent
impressions on their senses. In ideas thus got, the mind discovers that
some agree and others differ, probably as soon as it has any use of
memory; as soon as it is able to retain and perceive distinct ideas.
But whether it be then or no, this is certain, it does so long before
it has the use of words; or comes to that which we commonly call “the
use of reason.” For a child knows as certainly before it can speak the
difference between the ideas of sweet and bitter (i.e. that sweet is
not bitter), as it knows afterwards (when it comes to speak) that
wormwood and sugarplums are not the same thing.
16. Assent to supposed innate truths depends on having clear and
distinct ideas of what their terms mean, and not on their innateness.
A child knows not that three and four are equal to seven, till he comes
to be able to count seven, and has got the name and idea of equality;
and then, upon explaining those words, he presently assents to, or
rather perceives the truth of that proposition. But neither does he
then readily assent because it is an innate truth, nor was his assent
wanting till then because he wanted the use of reason; but the truth of
it appears to him as soon as he has settled in his mind the clear and
distinct ideas that these names stand for. And then he knows the truth
of that proposition upon the same ground and by the same means, that he
knew before that a rod and a cherry are not the same thing; and upon
the same ground also that he may come to know afterwards “That it is
impossible for the same thing to be and not to be,” as shall be more
fully shown hereafter. So that the later it is before any one comes to
have those general ideas about which those maxims are; or to know the
signification of those generic terms that stand for them; or to put
together in his mind the ideas they stand for; the later also will it
be before he comes to assent to those maxims;—whose terms, with the
ideas they stand for, being no more innate than those of a cat or a
weasel he must stay till time and observation have acquainted him with
them; and then he will be in a capacity to know the truth of these
maxims, upon the first occasion that shall make him put together those
ideas in his mind, and observe whether they agree or disagree,
according as is expressed in those propositions. And therefore it is
that a man knows that eighteen and nineteen are equal to thirty-seven,
by the same self-evidence that he knows one and two to be equal to
three: yet a child knows this not so soon as the other; not for want of
the use of reason, but because the ideas the words eighteen nineteen,
and thirty-seven stand for, are not so soon got, as those which are
signified by one, two, and three.
17. Assenting as soon as proposed and understood, proves them not
innate.
This evasion therefore of general assent when men come to the use of
reason, failing as it does, and leaving no difference between those
supposed innate and other truths that are afterwards acquired and
learnt, men have endeavoured to secure an universal assent to those
they call maxims, by saying, they are generally assented to as soon as
proposed, and the terms they are proposed in understood: seeing all
men, even children, as soon as they hear and understand the terms,
assent to these propositions, they think it is sufficient to prove them
innate. For, since men never fail after they have once understood the
words, to acknowledge them for undoubted truths, they would infer, that
certainly these propositions were first lodged in the understanding,
which, without any teaching, the mind, at the very first proposal
immediately closes with and assents to, and after that never doubts
again.
18. If such an Assent be a Mark of Innate, then “that one and two are
equal to three, that Sweetness is not Bitterness,” and a thousand the
like, must be innate.
In answer to this, I demand whether ready assent given to a
proposition, upon first hearing and understanding the terms, be a
certain mark of an innate principle? If it be not, such a general
assent is in vain urged as a proof of them: if it be said that it is a
mark of innate, they must then allow all such propositions to be innate
which are generally assented to as soon as heard, whereby they will
find themselves plentifully stored with innate principles. For upon the
same ground, viz. of assent at first hearing and understanding the
terms, that men would have those maxims pass for innate, they must also
admit several propositions about numbers to be innate; and thus, that
one and two are equal to three, that two and two are equal to four, and
a multitude of other the like propositions in numbers, that everybody
assents to at first hearing and understanding the terms, must have a
place amongst these innate axioms. Nor is this the prerogative of
numbers alone, and propositions made about several of them; but even
natural philosophy, and all the other sciences, afford propositions
which are sure to meet with assent as soon as they are understood. That
“two bodies cannot be in the same place” is a truth that nobody any
more sticks at than at these maxims, that “it is impossible for the
same thing to be and not to be,” that “white is not black,” that “a
square is not a circle,” that “bitterness is not sweetness.” These and
a million of such other propositions, as many at least as we have
distinct ideas of, every man in his wits, at first hearing, and
knowing, what the names stand for, must necessarily assent to. If these
men will be true to their own rule, and have assent at first hearing
and understanding the terms to be a mark of innate, they must allow not
only as many innate propositions, as men have distinct ideas; but as
many as men can make propositions wherein, different ideas are denied
one of another. Since every proposition wherein one different idea is
denied of another, will as certainly find assent at first hearing and
understanding the terms as this general one, “It is impossible for the
same thing to be and not to be,” or that which is the foundation of it
and is the easier understood of the two, “The same is not different”;
by which account they will have legions of innate propositions of this
one sort, without mentioning any other. But, since no proposition can
be innate unless the _ideas_ about which it is be innate, this will be
to suppose all our ideas of colours, sounds, tastes, figure, &c.,
innate, than which there cannot be anything more opposite to reason and
experience. Universal and ready assent upon hearing and understanding
the terms is, I grant, a mark of self-evidence; but self-evidence,
depending not on innate impressions, but on something else, (as we
shall show hereafter,) belongs to several propositions which nobody was
yet so extravagant as to pretend to be innate.
19. Such less general Propositions known before these universal Maxims.
Nor let it be said, that those more particular self-evident
propositions, which are assented to at first hearing, as that “one and
two are equal to three,” that “green is not red,” &c., are received as
the consequences of those more universal propositions which are looked
on as innate principles; since any one, who will but take the pains to
observe what passes in the understanding, will certainly find that
these, and the like less general propositions, are certainly known, and
firmly assented to by those who are utterly ignorant of those more
general maxims; and so, being earlier in the mind than those (as they
are called) first principles, cannot owe to them the assent wherewith
they are received at first hearing.
20. One and one equal to Two, &c., not general nor useful answered.
If it be said, that these propositions, viz. “two and two are equal to
four,” “red is not blue,” &c., are not general maxims nor of any great
use, I answer, that makes nothing to the argument of universal assent
upon hearing and understanding. For, if that be the certain mark of
innate, whatever propositions can be found that receives general assent
as soon as heard understood, that must be admitted for an innate
proposition as well as this maxim, “That it is impossible for the same
thing to be and not to be,” they being upon this ground equal. And as
to the difference of being more general, that makes this maxim more
remote from being innate; those general and abstract ideas being more
strangers to our first apprehensions than those of more particular
self-evident propositions; and therefore it is longer before they are
admitted, and assented to by the growing understanding. And as to the
usefulness of these magnified maxims, that perhaps will not be found so
great as is generally conceived, when it comes in its due place to be
more fully considered.
21. These Maxims not being known sometimes till proposed, proves them
not innate.
But we have not yet done with “assenting to propositions at first
hearing and understanding their terms.” It is fit we first take notice
that this, instead of being a mark that they are innate, is a proof of
the contrary; since it supposes that several, who understand and know
other things, are ignorant of these principles till they are proposed
to them; and that one may be unacquainted with these truths till he
hears them from others. For, if they were innate, what need they be
proposed in order to gaining assent, when, by being in the
understanding, by a natural and original impression, (if there were any
such,) they could not but be known before? Or doth the proposing them
print them clearer in the mind than nature did? If so, then the
consequence will be, that a man knows them better after he has been
thus taught them than he did before. Whence it will follow that these
principles may be made more evident to us by others’ teaching than
nature has made them by impression: which will ill agree with the
opinion of innate principles, and give but little authority to them;
but, on the contrary, makes them unfit to be the foundations of all our
other knowledge; as they are pretended to be. This cannot be denied,
that men grow first acquainted with many of these self-evident truths
upon their being proposed: but it is clear that whosoever does so,
finds in himself that he then begins to know a proposition, which he
knew not before, and which from thenceforth he never questions; not
because it was innate, but because the consideration of the nature of
the things contained in those words would not suffer him to think
otherwise, how, or whensoever he is brought to reflect on them. And if
whatever is assented to at first hearing and understanding the terms
must pass for an innate principle, every well-grounded observation,
drawn from particulars into a general rule, must be innate. When yet it
is certain that not all, but only sagacious heads, light at first on
these observations, and reduce them into general propositions: not
innate but collected from a preceding acquaintance and reflection on
particular instances. These, when observing men have made them,
unobserving men, when they are proposed to them cannot refuse their
assent to.
22. Implicitly known before proposing, signifies that the Mind is
capable of understanding them, or else signifies nothing.
If it be said, the understanding hath an IMPLICIT knowledge of these
principles, but not an EXPLICIT, before this first hearing (as they
must who will say “that they are in the understanding before they are
known,”) it will be hard to conceive what is meant by a principle
imprinted on the understanding implicitly, unless it be this,—that the
mind is capable of understanding and assenting firmly to such
propositions. And thus all mathematical demonstrations, as well as
first principles, must be received as native impressions on the mind;
which I fear they will scarce allow them to be, who find it harder to
demonstrate a proposition than assent to it when demonstrated. And few
mathematicians will be forward to believe, that all the diagrams they
have drawn were but copies of those innate characters which nature had
engraven upon their minds.
23. The Argument of assenting on first hearing, is upon a false
supposition of no precedent teaching.
There is, I fear, this further weakness in the foregoing argument,
which would persuade us that therefore those maxims are to be thought
innate, which men admit at first hearing; because they assent to
propositions which they are not taught, nor do receive from the force
of any argument or demonstration, but a bare explication or
understanding of the terms. Under which there seems to me to lie this
fallacy, that men are supposed not to be taught nor to learn anything
_de novo;_ when, in truth, they are taught, and do learn something they
were ignorant of before. For, first, it is evident that they have
learned the terms, and their signification; neither of which was born
with them. But this is not all the acquired knowledge in the case: the
ideas themselves, about which the proposition is, are not born with
them, no more than their names, but got afterwards. So that in all
propositions that are assented to at first hearing, the terms of the
proposition, their standing for such ideas, and the ideas themselves
that they stand for, being neither of them innate, I would fain know
what there is remaining in such propositions that is innate. For I
would gladly have any one name that proposition whose terms or ideas
were either of them innate. We by degrees get ideas and names, and
learn their appropriated connexion one with another; and then to
propositions made in such terms, whose signification we have learnt,
and wherein the agreement or disagreement we can perceive in our ideas
when put together is expressed, we at first hearing assent; though to
other propositions, in themselves as certain and evident, but which are
concerning ideas not so soon or so easily got, we are at the same time
no way capable of assenting. For, though a child quickly assents to
this proposition, “That an apple is not fire,” when by familiar
acquaintance he has got the ideas of those two different things
distinctly imprinted on his mind, and has learnt that the names apple
and fire stand for them; yet it will be some years after, perhaps,
before the same child will assent to this proposition, “That it is
impossible for the same thing to be and not to be”; because that,
though perhaps the words are as easy to be learnt, yet the
signification of them being more large, comprehensive, and abstract
than of the names annexed to those sensible things the child hath to do
with, it is longer before he learns their precise meaning, and it
requires more time plainly to form in his mind those general ideas they
stand for. Till that be done, you will in vain endeavour to make any
child assent to a proposition made up of such general terms; but as
soon as ever he has got those ideas, and learned their names, he
forwardly closes with the one as well as the other of the forementioned
propositions: and with both for the same reason; viz. because he finds
the ideas he has in his mind to agree or disagree, according as the
words standing for them are affirmed or denied one of another in the
proposition. But if propositions be brought to him in words which stand
for ideas he has not yet in his mind, to such propositions, however
evidently true or false in themselves, he affords neither assent nor
dissent, but is ignorant. For words being but empty sounds, any further
than they are signs of our ideas, we cannot but assent to them as they
correspond to those ideas we have, but no further than that. But the
showing by what steps and ways knowledge comes into our minds; and the
grounds of several degrees of assent, being; the business of the
following Discourse, it may suffice to have only touched on it here, as
one reason that made me doubt of those innate principles.
24. Not innate because not universally assented to.
To conclude this argument of universal consent, I agree with these
defenders of innate principles,—that if they are innate, they must
needs have universal assent. For that a truth should be innate and yet
not assented to, is to me as unintelligible as for a man to know a
truth and be ignorant of it at the same time. But then, by these men’s
own confession, they cannot be innate; since they are not assented to
by those who understand not the terms; nor by a great part of those who
do understand them, but have yet never heard nor thought of those
propositions; which, I think, is at least one half of mankind. But were
the number far less, it would be enough to destroy universal assent,
and thereby show these propositions not to be innate, if children alone
were ignorant of them.
25. These Maxims not the first known.
But that I may not be accused to argue from the thoughts of infants,
which are unknown to us, and to conclude from what passes in their
understandings before they express it; I say next, that these two
general propositions are not the truths that first possess the minds of
children, nor are antecedent to all acquired and adventitious notions:
which, if they were innate, they must needs be. Whether we can
determine it or no, it matters not, there is certainly a time when
children begin to think, and their words and actions do assure us that
they do so. When therefore they are capable of thought, of knowledge,
of assent, can it rationally be supposed they can be ignorant of those
notions that nature has imprinted, were there any such? Can it be
imagined, with any appearance of reason, that they perceive the
impressions from things without, and be at the same time ignorant of
those characters which nature itself has taken care to stamp within?
Can they receive and assent to adventitious notions, and be ignorant of
those which are supposed woven into the very principles of their being,
and imprinted there in indelible characters, to be the foundation and
guide of all their acquired knowledge and future reasonings? This would
be to make nature take pains to no purpose; or at least to write very
ill; since its characters could not be read by those eyes which saw
other things very well: and those are very ill supposed the clearest
parts of truth, and the foundations of all our knowledge, which are not
first known, and without which the undoubted knowledge of several other
things may be had. The child certainly knows, that the nurse that feeds
it is neither the cat it plays with, nor the blackmoor it is afraid of:
that the wormseed or mustard it refuses, is not the apple or sugar it
cries for: this it is certainly and undoubtedly assured of: but will
any one say, it is by virtue of this principle, “That it is impossible
for the same thing to be and not to be,” that it so firmly assents to
these and other parts of its knowledge? Or that the child has any
notion or apprehension of that proposition at an age, wherein yet, it
is plain, it knows a great many other truths? He that will say,
children join in these general abstract speculations with their
sucking-bottles and their rattles, may perhaps, with justice, be
thought to have more passion and zeal for his opinion, but less
sincerity and truth, than one of that age.
26. And so not innate.
Though therefore there be several general propositions that meet with
constant and ready assent, as soon as proposed to men grown up, who
have attained the use of more general and abstract ideas, and names
standing for them; yet they not being to be found in those of tender
years, who nevertheless know other things, they cannot pretend to
universal assent of intelligent persons, and so by no means can be
supposed innate;—it being impossible that any truth which is innate (if
there were any such) should be unknown, at least to any one who knows
anything else. Since, if they are innate truths, they must be innate
thoughts: there being nothing a truth in the mind that it has never
thought on. Whereby it is evident, if there be any innate truths, they
must necessarily be the first of any thought on; the first that appear.
27. Not innate, because they appear least, where what is innate shows
itself clearest.
That the general maxims we are discoursing of are not known to
children, idiots, and a great part of mankind, we have already
sufficiently proved: whereby it is evident they have not an universal
assent, nor are general impressions. But there is this further argument
in it against their being innate: that these characters, if they were
native and original impressions, should appear fairest and clearest in
those persons in whom yet we find no footsteps of them; and it is, in
my opinion, a strong presumption that they are not innate, since they
are least known to those in whom, if they were innate, they must needs
exert themselves with most force and vigour. For children, idiots,
savages, and illiterate people, being of all others the least corrupted
by custom, or borrowed opinions; learning and education having not cast
their native thoughts into new moulds; nor by superinducing foreign and
studied doctrines, confounded those fair characters nature had written
there; one might reasonably imagine that in THEIR minds these innate
notions should lie open fairly to every one’s view, as it is certain
the thoughts of children do. It might very well be expected that these
principles should be perfectly known to naturals; which being stamped
immediately on the soul, (as these men suppose,) can have no dependence
on the constitution or organs of the body, the only confessed
difference between them and others. One would think, according to these
men’s principles, that all these native beams of light (were there any
such) should, in those who have no reserves, no arts of concealment,
shine out in their full lustre, and leave us in no more doubt of their
being there, than we are of their love of pleasure and abhorrence of
pain. But alas, amongst children, idiots, savages, and the grossly
illiterate, what general maxims are to be found? what universal
principles of knowledge? Their notions are few and narrow, borrowed
only from those objects they have had most to do with, and which have
made upon their senses the frequentest and strongest impressions. A
child knows his nurse and his cradle, and by degrees the playthings of
a little more advanced age; and a young savage has, perhaps, his head
filled with love and hunting, according to the fashion of his tribe.
But he that from a child untaught, or a wild inhabitant of the woods,
will expect these abstract maxims and reputed principles of science,
will, I fear find himself mistaken. Such kind of general propositions
are seldom mentioned in the huts of Indians: much less are they to be
found in the thoughts of children, or any impressions of them on the
minds of naturals. They are the language and business of the schools
and academies of learned nations accustomed to that sort of
conversation or learning, where disputes are frequent; these maxims
being suited to artificial argumentation and useful for conviction, but
not much conducing to the discovery of truth or advancement of
knowledge. But of their small use for the improvement of knowledge I
shall have occasion to speak more at large, l.4, c. 7.
28. Recapitulation.
I know not how absurd this may seem to the masters of demonstration.
And probably it will hardly go down with anybody at first hearing. I
must therefore beg a little truce with prejudice, and the forbearance
of censure, till I have been heard out in the sequel of this Discourse,
being very willing to submit to better judgments. And since I
impartially search after truth, I shall not be sorry to be convinced,
that I have been too fond of my own notions; which I confess we are all
apt to be, when application and study have warmed our heads with them.
Upon the whole matter, I cannot see any ground to think these two
speculative Maxims innate: since they are not universally assented to;
and the assent they so generally find is no other than what several
propositions, not allowed to be innate, equally partake in with them:
and since the assent that is given them is produced another way, and
comes not from natural inscription, as I doubt not but to make appear
in the following Discourse. And if THESE “first principles” of
knowledge and science are found not to be innate, no OTHER speculative
maxims can (I suppose), with better right pretend to be so.
CHAPTER III.
NO INNATE PRACTICAL PRINCIPLES
1. 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.”
Whereby it is evident that they are further removed from a title to be
innate; and the doubt of their being native impressions on the mind is
stronger against those moral principles than the other. Not that it
brings their truth at all in question. They are equally true, though
not equally evident. Those speculative maxims carry their own evidence
with them: but moral principles require reasoning and discourse, and
some exercise of the mind, to discover the certainty of their truth.
They lie not open as natural characters engraved on the mind; which, if
any such were, they must needs be visible by themselves, and by their
own light be certain and known to everybody. But this is no derogation
to their truth and certainty; no more than it is to the truth or
certainty of the three angles of a triangle being equal to two right
ones because it is not so evident as “the whole is bigger than a part,”
nor so apt to be assented to at first hearing. It may suffice that
these moral rules are capable of demonstration: and therefore it is our
own faults if we come not to a certain knowledge of them. But the
ignorance wherein many men are of them, and the slowness of assent
wherewith others receive them, are manifest proofs that they are not
innate, and such as offer themselves to their view without searching.
2. Faith and Justice not owned as Principles by all Men.
Whether there be any such moral principles, wherein all men do agree, I
appeal to any who have been but moderately conversant in the history of
mankind, and looked abroad beyond the smoke of their own chimneys.
Where is that practical truth that is universally received, without
doubt or question, as it must be if innate? JUSTICE, and keeping of
contracts, is that which most men seem to agree in. This is a principle
which is thought to extend itself to the dens of thieves, and the
confederacies of the greatest villains; and they who have gone furthest
towards the putting off of humanity itself, keep faith and rules of
justice one with another. I grant that outlaws themselves do this one
amongst another: but it is without receiving these as the innate laws
of nature. They practise them as rules of convenience within their own
communities: but it is impossible to conceive that he embraces justice
as a practical principle who acts fairly with his fellow-highwayman,
and at the same time plunders or kills the next honest man he meets
with. Justice and truth are the common ties of society; and therefore
even outlaws and robbers, who break with all the world besides, must
keep faith and rules of equity amongst themselves; or else they cannot
hold together. But will any one say, that those that live by fraud or
rapine have innate principles of truth and justice which they allow and
assent to?
3. Objection: though Men deny them in their Practice, yet they admit
them in their Thoughts answered.
Perhaps it will be urged, that the tacit assent of their minds agrees
to what their practice contradicts. I answer, first, I have always
thought the actions of men the best interpreters of their thoughts.
But, since it is certain that most men’s practices, and some men’s open
professions, have either questioned or denied these principles, it is
impossible to establish an universal consent, (though we should look
for it only amongst grown men,) without which it is impossible to
conclude them innate. Secondly, it is very strange and unreasonable to
suppose innate practical principles, that terminate only in
contemplation. Practical principles, derived from nature, are there for
operation, and must produce conformity of action, not barely
speculative assent to their truth, or else they are in vain
distinguished from speculative maxims. Nature, I confess, has put into
man a desire of happiness and an aversion to misery: these indeed are
innate practical principles which (as practical principles ought) DO
continue constantly to operate and influence all our actions without
ceasing: these may be observed in all persons and all ages, steady and
universal; but these are INCLINATIONS OF THE APPETITE to good, not
impressions of truth on the understanding. I deny not that there are
natural tendencies imprinted on the minds of men; and that from the
very first instances of sense and perception, there are some things
that are grateful and others unwelcome to them; some things that they
incline to and others that they fly: but this makes nothing for innate
characters on the mind, which are to be the principles of knowledge
regulating our practice. Such natural impressions on the understanding
are so far from being confirmed hereby, that this is an argument
against them; since, if there were certain characters imprinted by
nature on the understanding, as the principles of knowledge, we could
not but perceive them constantly operate in us and influence our
knowledge, as we do those others on the will and appetite; which never
cease to be the constant springs and motives of all our actions, to
which we perpetually feel them strongly impelling us.
4. Moral Rules need a Proof, _ergo_ not innate.
Another reason that makes me doubt of any innate practical principles
is, that I think _there cannot any one moral Rule be propos’d whereof a
Man may not justly demand a Reason:_ which would be perfectly
ridiculous and absurd if they were innate; or so much as self-evident,
which every innate principle must needs be, and not need any proof to
ascertain its truth, nor want any reason to gain it approbation. He
would be thought void of common sense who asked on the one side, or on
the other side went to give a reason WHY “it is impossible for the same
thing to be and not to be.” It carries its own light and evidence with
it, and needs no other proof: he that understands the terms assents to
it for its own sake or else nothing will ever be able to prevail with
him to do it. But should that most unshaken rule of morality and
foundation of all social virtue, “That one should do as he would be
done unto,” be proposed to one who never heard of it before, but yet is
of capacity to understand its meaning; might he not without any
absurdity ask a reason why? And were not he that proposed it bound to
make out the truth and reasonableness of it to him? Which plainly shows
it not to be innate; for if it were it could neither want nor receive
any proof; but must needs (at least as soon as heard and understood) be
received and assented to as an unquestionable truth, which a man can by
no means doubt of. So that the truth of all these moral rules plainly
depends upon some other antecedent to them, and from which they must be
deduced; which could not be if either they were innate or so much as
self-evident.
5. Instance in keeping Compacts
That men should keep their compacts is certainly a great and undeniable
rule in morality. But yet, if a Christian, who has the view of
happiness and misery in another life, be asked why a man must keep his
word, he will give this as a reason:—Because God, who has the power of
eternal life and death, requires it of us. But if a Hobbist be asked
why? he will answer:—Because the public requires it, and the Leviathan
will punish you if you do not. And if one of the old philosophers had
been asked, he would have answered:—Because it was dishonest, below the
dignity of a man, and opposite to virtue, the highest perfection of
human nature, to do otherwise.
6. Virtue generally approved not because innate, but because
profitable.
Hence naturally flows the great variety of opinions concerning moral
rules which are to be found among men, according to the different sorts
of happiness they have a prospect of, or propose to themselves; which
could not be if practical principles were innate, and imprinted in our
minds immediately by the hand of God. I grant the existence of God is
so many ways manifest, and the obedience we owe him so congruous to the
light of reason, that a great part of mankind give testimony to the law
of nature: but yet I think it must be allowed that several moral rules
may receive from mankind a very general approbation, without either
knowing or admitting the true ground of morality; which can only be the
will and law of a God, who sees men in the dark, has in his hand
rewards and punishments, and power enough to call to account the
proudest offender. For, God having, by an inseparable connexion, joined
virtue and public happiness together, and made the practice thereof
necessary to the preservation of society, and visibly beneficial to all
with whom the virtuous man has to do; it is no wonder that every one
should not only allow, but recommend and magnify those rules to others,
from whose observance of them he is sure to reap advantage to himself.
He may, out of interest as well as conviction, cry up that for sacred,
which, if once trampled on and profaned, he himself cannot be safe nor
secure. This, though it takes nothing from the moral and eternal
obligation which these rules evidently have, yet it shows that the
outward acknowledgment men pay to them in their words proves not that
they are innate principles: nay, it proves not so much as that men
assent to them inwardly in their own minds, as the inviolable rules of
their own practice; since we find that self-interest, and the
conveniences of this life, make many men own an outward profession and
approbation of them, whose actions sufficiently prove that they very
little consider the Lawgiver that prescribed these rules; nor the hell
that he has ordained for the punishment of those that transgress them.
7. Men’s actions convince us, that the Rule of Virtue is not their
internal Principle.
For, if we will not in civility allow too much sincerity to the
professions of most men, but think their actions to be the interpreters
of their thoughts, we shall find that they have no such internal
veneration for these rules, nor so full a persuasion of their certainty
and obligation. The great principle of morality, ‘To do as one would be
done to,’ is more commended than practised. But the breach of this rule
cannot be a greater vice, than to teach others, that it is no moral
rule, nor obligatory, would be thought madness, and contrary to that
interest men sacrifice to, when they break it themselves. Perhaps
CONSCIENCE will be urged as checking us for such breaches, and so the
internal obligation and establishment of the rule be preserved.
8. Conscience no Proof of any innate Moral Rule.
To which I answer, that I doubt not but, without being written on their
hearts, many men may, by the same way that they come to the knowledge
of other things, come to assent to several moral rules, and be
convinced of their obligation. Others also may come to be of the same
mind, from their education, company, and customs of their country;
which persuasion, however got, will serve to set conscience on work;
which is nothing else but our own opinion or judgment of the moral
rectitude or gravity of our own actions; and if conscience be a proof
of innate principles, contraries may be innate principles; since some
men with the same bent of conscience prosecute what others avoid.
9. Instances of Enormities practised without Remorse.
But I cannot see how any men should ever transgress those moral rules,
with confidence and serenity, were they innate, and stamped upon their
minds. View but an army at the sacking of a town, and see what
observation or sense of moral principles, or what touch of conscience
for all the outrages they do. Robberies, murders, rapes, are the sports
of men set at liberty from punishment and censure. Have there not been
whole nations, and those of the most civilized people, amongst whom the
exposing their children, and leaving them in the fields to perish by
want or wild beasts has been the practice; as little condemned or
scrupled as the begetting them? Do they not still, in some countries,
put them into the same graves with their mothers, if they die in
childbirth; or despatch them, if a pretended astrologer declares them
to have unhappy stars? And are there not places where, at a certain
age, they kill or expose their parents, without any remorse at all? In
a part of Asia, the sick, when their case comes to be thought
desperate, are carried out and laid on the earth before they are dead;
and left there, exposed to wind and weather, to perish without
assistance or pity. It is familiar among the Mingrelians, a people
professing Christianity, to bury their children alive without scruple.
There are places where they eat their own children. The Caribbees were
wont to geld their children, on purpose to fat and eat them. And
Garcilasso de la Vega tells us of a people in Peru which were wont to
fat and eat the children they got on their female captives, whom they
kept as concubines for that purpose, and when they were past breeding,
the mothers themselves were killed too and eaten. The virtues whereby
the Tououpinambos believed they merited paradise, were revenge, and
eating abundance of their enemies. They have not so much as a name for
God, and have no religion, no worship. The saints who are canonized
amongst the Turks, lead lives which one cannot with modesty relate. A
remarkable passage to this purpose, out of the voyage of Baumgarten,
which is a book not every day to be met with, I shall set down at
large, in the language it is published in.
Ibi (sc. prope Belbes in Aegypto) vidimus sanctum unum Saracenicum
inter arenarum cumulos, ita ut ex utero matris prodiit nudum sedentem.
Mos est, ut didicimus, Mahometistis, ut eos, qui amentes et sine
ratione sunt, pro sanctis colant et venerentur. Insuper et eos, qui cum
diu vitam egerint inquinatissimam, voluntariam demum poenitentiam et
paupertatem, sanctitate venerandos deputant. Ejusmodi vero genus
hominum libertatem quandam effrenem habent, domos quos volunt intrandi,
edendi, bibendi, et quod majus est, concumbendi; ex quo concubitu, si
proles secuta fuerit, sancta similiter habetur. His ergo hominibus dum
vivunt, magnos exhibent honores; mortuis vero vel templa vel monumenta
extruunt amplissima, eosque contingere ac sepelire maximae fortunae
ducunt loco. Audivimus haec dicta et dicenda per interpretem a Mucrelo
nostro. Insuper sanctum ilium, quern eo loco vidimus, publicitus
apprime commendari, eum esse hominem sanctum, divinum ac integritate
praecipuum; eo quod, nec faminarum unquam esset, nec puerorum, sed
tantummodo asellarum concubitor atque mularum. (Peregr. Baumgarten, 1.
ii. c. i. p. 73.)
Where then are those innate principles of justice, piety, gratitude,
equity, chastity? Or where is that universal consent that assures us
there are such inbred rules? Murders in duels, when fashion has made
them honourable, are committed without remorse of conscience: nay, in
many places innocence in this case is the greatest ignominy. And if we
look abroad to take a view of men as they are, we shall find that they
have remorse, in one place, for doing or omitting that which others, in
another place, think they merit by.
10. Men have contrary practical Principles.
He that will carefully peruse the history of mankind, and look abroad
into the several tribes of men, and with indifferency survey their
actions, will be able to satisfy himself, that there is scarce that
principle of morality to be named, or, rule of virtue to be thought on,
(those only excepted that are absolutely necessary to hold society
together, which commonly too are neglected betwixt distinct societies,)
which is not, somewhere or other, slighted and condemned by the general
fashion of whole societies of men, governed by practical opinions and
rules of living quite opposite to others.
11. Whole Nations reject several Moral Rules.
Here perhaps it will be objected, that it is no argument that the rule
is not known, because it is broken. I grant the objection good where
men, though they transgress, yet disown not the law; where fear of
shame, censure, or punishment, carries the mark of some awe it has upon
them. But it is impossible to conceive that a whole nation of men
should all publicly reject and renounce what every one of them
certainly and infallibly knew to be a law; for so they must who have it
naturally imprinted on their minds. It is possible men may sometimes
own rules of morality which in their private thoughts they do not
believe to be true, only to keep themselves in reputation and esteem
amongst those who are persuaded of their obligation. But it is not to
be imagined that a whole society of men should publicly and professedly
disown and cast off a rule which they could not in their own minds but
be infallibly certain was a law; nor be ignorant that all men they
should have to do with knew it to be such: and therefore must every one
of them apprehend from others all the contempt and abhorrence due to
one who professes himself void of humanity: and one who, confounding
the known and natural measures of right and wrong, cannot but be looked
on as the professed enemy of their peace and happiness. Whatever
practical principle is innate, cannot but be known to every one to be
just and good. It is therefore little less than a contradiction to
suppose, that whole nations of men should, both in their professions
and practice, unanimously and universally give the lie to what, by the
most invincible evidence, every one of them knew to be true, right, and
good. This is enough to satisfy us that no practical rule which is
anywhere universally, and with public approbation or allowance,
transgressed, can be supposed innate.—But I have something further to
add in answer to this objection.
12. The generally allowed breach of a rule proof that it is not innate.
The breaking of a rule, say you, is no argument that it is unknown. I
grant it: but the GENERALLY ALLOWED breach of it anywhere, I say, is a
proof that it is not innate. For example: let us take any of these
rules, which, being the most obvious deductions of human reason, and
conformable to the natural inclination of the greatest part of men,
fewest people have had the impudence to deny or inconsideration to
doubt of. If any can be thought to be naturally imprinted, none, I
think, can have a fairer pretence to be innate than this: “Parents,
preserve and cherish your children.” When, therefore, you say that this
is an innate rule, what do you mean? Either that it is an innate
principle which upon all occasions excites and directs the actions of
all men; or else, that it is a truth which all men have imprinted on
their minds, and which therefore they know and assent to. But in
neither of these senses is it innate. FIRST, that it is not a principle
which influences all men’s actions, is what I have proved by the
examples before cited: nor need we seek so far as the Mingrelia or Peru
to find instances of such as neglect, abuse, nay, and destroy their
children; or look on it only as the more than brutality of some savage
and barbarous nations, when we remember that it was a familiar and
uncondemned practice amongst the Greeks and Romans to expose, without
pity or remorse, their innocent infants. SECONDLY, that it is an innate
truth, known to all men, is also false. For, “Parents preserve your
children,” is so far from an innate truth, that it is no truth at all:
it being a command, and not a proposition, and so not capable of truth
or falsehood. To make it capable of being assented to as true, it must
be reduced to some such proposition as this: “It is the duty of parents
to preserve their children.” But what duty is, cannot be understood
without a law; nor a law be known or supposed without a lawmaker, or
without reward and punishment; so that it is impossible that this, or
any other, practical principle should be innate, i.e. be imprinted on
the mind as a duty, without supposing the ideas of God, of law, of
obligation, of punishment, of a life after this, innate: for that
punishment follows not in this life the breach of this rule, and
consequently that it has not the force of a law in countries where the
generally allowed practice runs counter to it, is in itself evident.
But these ideas (which must be all of them innate, if anything as a
duty be so) are so far from being innate, that it is not every studious
or thinking man, much less every one that is born, in whom they are to
be found clear and distinct; and that one of them, which of all others
seems most likely to be innate, is not so, (I mean the idea of God,) I
think, in the next chapter, will appear very evident to any considering
man.
13. If men can be ignorant of what is innate, certainty is not
described by innate principles.
From what has been said, I think we may safely conclude that whatever
practical rule is in any place generally and with allowance broken,
cannot be supposed innate; it being impossible that men should, without
shame or fear, confidently and serenely, break a rule which they could
not but evidently know that God had set up, and would certainly punish
the breach of, (which they must, if it were innate,) to a degree to
make it a very ill bargain to the transgressor. Without such a
knowledge as this, a man can never be certain that anything is his
duty. Ignorance or doubt of the law, hopes to escape the knowledge or
power of the law-maker, or the like, may make men give way to a present
appetite; but let any one see the fault, and the rod by it, and with
the transgression, a fire ready to punish it; a pleasure tempting, and
the hand of the Almighty visibly held up and prepared to take
vengeance, (for this must be the case where any duty is imprinted on
the mind,) and then tell me whether it be possible for people with such
a prospect, such a certain knowledge as this, wantonly, and without
scruple, to offend against a law which they carry about them in
indelible characters, and that stares them in the face whilst they are
breaking it? Whether men, at the same time that they feel in themselves
the imprinted edicts of an Omnipotent Law-maker, can, with assurance
and gaiety, slight and trample underfoot his most sacred injunctions?
And lastly, whether it be possible that whilst a man thus openly bids
defiance to this innate law and supreme Lawgiver, all the bystanders,
yea, even the governors and rulers of the people, full of the same
sense both of the law and Law-maker, should silently connive, without
testifying their dislike or laying the least blame on it? Principles of
actions indeed there are lodged in men’s appetites; but these are so
far from being innate moral principles, that if they were left to their
full swing they would carry men to the overturning of all morality.
Moral laws are set as a curb and restraint to these exorbitant desires,
which they cannot be but by rewards and punishments that will
overbalance the satisfaction any one shall propose to himself in the
breach of the law. If, therefore, anything be imprinted on the minds of
all men as a law, all men must have a certain and unavoidable knowledge
that certain and unavoidable punishment will attend the breach of it.
For if men can be ignorant or doubtful of what is innate, innate
principles are insisted on, and urged to no purpose; truth and
certainty (the things pretended) are not at all secured by them; but
men are in the same uncertain floating estate with as without them. An
evident indubitable knowledge of unavoidable punishment, great enough
to make the transgression very uneligible, must accompany an innate
law; unless with an innate law they can suppose an innate Gospel too. I
would not here be mistaken, as if, because I deny an innate law I
thought there were none but positive laws. There is a great deal of
difference between an innate law, and a law of nature between something
imprinted on our minds in their very original, and something that we,
being ignorant of, may attain to the knowledge of, by the use and due
application of our natural faculties. And I think they equally forsake
the truth who, running into contrary extremes, either affirm an innate
law, or deny that there is a law knowable by the light of nature, i.e.
without the help of positive revelation.
14. Those who maintain innate practical Principles tell us not what
they are.
The difference there is amongst men in their practical principles is so
evident that I think I need say no more to evince, that it will be
impossible to find any innate moral rules by this mark of general
assent; and it is enough to make one suspect that the supposition of
such innate principles is but an opinion taken up at pleasure; since
those who talk so confidently of them are so sparing to tell us WHICH
THEY ARE. This might with justice be expected from those men who lay
stress upon this opinion; and it gives occasion to distrust either
their knowledge or charity, who, declaring that God has imprinted on
the minds of men the foundations of knowledge and the rules of living,
are yet so little favourable to the information of their neighbours, or
the quiet of mankind, as not to point out to them which they are, in
the variety men are distracted with. But, in truth, were there any such
innate principles there would be no need to teach them. Did men find
such innate propositions stamped on their minds, they would easily be
able to distinguish them from other truths that they afterwards learned
and deduced from them; and there would be nothing more easy than to
know what, and how many, they were. There could be no more doubt about
their number than there is about the number of our fingers; and it is
like then every system would be ready to give them us by tale. But
since nobody, that I know, has ventured yet to give a catalogue of
them, they cannot blame those who doubt of these innate principles;
since even they who require men to believe that there are such innate
propositions, do not tell us what they are. It is easy to foresee, that
if different men of different sects should go about to give us a list
of those innate practical principles, they would set down only such as
suited their distinct hypotheses, and were fit to support the doctrines
of their particular schools or churches; a plain evidence that there
are no such innate truths. Nay, a great part of men are so far from
finding any such innate moral principles in themselves, that, by
denying freedom to mankind, and thereby making men no other than bare
machines, they take away not only innate, but all moral rules
whatsoever, and leave not a possibility to believe any such, to those
who cannot conceive how anything can be capable of a law that is not a
free agent. And upon that ground they must necessarily reject all
principles of virtue, who cannot put MORALITY and MECHANISM together,
which are not very easy to be reconciled or made consistent.
15. Lord Herbert’s innate Principles examined.
When I had written this, being informed that my Lord Herbert had, in
his book De Veritate, assigned these innate principles, I presently
consulted him, hoping to find in a man of so great parts, something
that might satisfy me in this point, and put an end to my inquiry. In
his chapter De Instinctu Naturali, I met with these six marks of his
Notitice Communes:—1. Prioritas. 2. Independentia. 3. Universalitas. 4.
Certitudo. 5. Necessitas, i. e. as he explains it, faciunt ad hominis
conservationem. 6. Modus conformationis, i.e. Assensus nulla
interposita mora. And at the latter end of his little treatise De
Religione Laici, he says this of these innate principles: Adeo ut non
uniuscujusvis religionis confinio arctentur quae ubique vigent
veritates. Sunt enim in ipsa mente caelitus descriptae, nullisque
traditionibus, sive scriptis, sive non scriptis, obnoxiae, p.3 And
Veritates nostrae catholicae, quae tanquam indubia Dei emata in foro
interiori descriptae.
Thus, having given the marks of the innate principles or common
notions, and asserted their being imprinted on the minds of men by the
hand of God, he proceeds to set them down, and they are these:—1. Esse
aliquod supremum numen. 2. Numen illud coli debere. 3. Virtutem cum
pietate conjunctam optimum esse rationem cultus divini. 4.
Resipiscendum esse a peccatis. 5. Dari praemium vel paenam post hanc
vitam transactam. Though I allow these to be clear truths, and such as,
if rightly explained, a rational creature can hardly avoid giving his
assent to, yet I think he is far from proving them innate impressions
in foro interiori descriptae. For I must take leave to observe:—
16. These five either not all, or more than all, if there are any.
First, that these five propositions are either not all, or more than
all, those common notions written on our minds by the finger of God; if
it were reasonable to believe any at all to be so written. Since there
are other propositions which, even by his own rules, have as just a
pretence to such an original, and may be as well admitted for innate
principles, as at least some of these five he enumerates, viz. ‘Do as
thou wouldst be done unto.’ And perhaps some hundreds of others, when
well considered.
17. The supposed marks wanting.
Secondly, that all his marks are not to be found in each of his five
propositions, viz. his first, second, and third marks agree perfectly
to neither of them; and the first, second, third, fourth, and sixth
marks agree but ill to his third, fourth, and fifth propositions. For,
besides that we are assured from history of many men, nay whole
nations, who doubt or disbelieve some or all of them, I cannot see how
the third, viz. “That virtue joined with piety is the best worship of
God,” can be an innate principle, when the name or sound virtue, is so
hard to be understood; liable to so much uncertainty in its
signification; and the thing it stands for so much contended about and
difficult to be known. And therefore this cannot be but a very
uncertain rule of human practice, and serve but very little to the
conduct of our lives, and is therefore very unfit to be assigned as an
innate practical principle.
18. Of little use if they were innate.
For let us consider this proposition as to its meaning, (for it is the
sense, and not sound, that is and must be the principle or common
notion,) viz. “Virtue is the best worship of God,” i.e. is most
acceptable to him; which, if virtue be taken, as most commonly it is,
for those actions which, according to the different opinions of several
countries, are accounted laudable, will be a proposition so far from
being certain, that it will not be true. If virtue be taken for actions
conformable to God’s will, or to the rule prescribed by God—which is
the true and only measure of virtue when virtue is used to signify what
is in its own nature right and good—then this proposition, “That virtue
is the best worship of God,” will be most true and certain, but of very
little use in human life: since it will amount to no more but this,
viz. “That God is pleased with the doing of what he commands”;—which a
man may certainly know to be true, without knowing what it is that God
doth command; and so be as far from any rule or principle of his
actions as he was before. And I think very few will take a proposition
which amounts to no more than this, viz. “That God is pleased with the
doing of what he himself commands,” for an innate moral principle
written on the minds of all men, (however true and certain it may be,)
since it teaches so little. Whosoever does so will have reason to think
hundreds of propositions innate principles; since there are many which
have as good a title as this to be received for such, which nobody yet
ever put into that rank of innate principles.
19. Scarce possible that God should engrave principles in words of
uncertain meaning.
Nor is the fourth proposition (viz. “Men must repent of their sins”)
much more instructive, till what those actions are that are meant by
sins be set down. For the word peccata, or sins, being put, as it
usually is, to signify in general ill actions that will draw punishment
upon the doers, what great principle of morality can that be to tell us
we should be sorry, and cease to do that which will bring mischief upon
us; without knowing what those particular actions are that will do so?
Indeed this is a very true proposition, and fit to be inculcated on and
received by those who are supposed to have been taught WHAT actions in
all kinds ARE sins: but neither this nor the former can be imagined to
be innate principles; nor to be of any use if they were innate, unless
the particular measures and bounds of all virtues and vices were
engraven in men’s minds, and were innate principles also, which I think
is very much to be doubted. And therefore, I imagine, it will scarcely
seem possible that God should engrave principles in men’s minds, in
words of uncertain signification, such as VIRTUES and SINS, which
amongst different men stand for different things: nay, it cannot be
supposed to be in words at all, which, being in most of these
principles very general names, cannot be understood but by knowing the
particulars comprehended under them. And in the practical instances,
the measures must be taken from the knowledge of the actions
themselves, and the rules of them,—abstracted from words, and
antecedent to the knowledge of names; which rules a man must know, what
language soever he chance to learn, whether English or Japan, or if he
should learn no language at all, or never should understand the use of
words, as happens in the case of dumb and deaf men. When it shall be
made out that men ignorant of words, or untaught by the laws and
customs of their country, know that it is part of the worship of God
not to kill another man; not to know more women than one; not to
procure abortion; not to expose their children; not to take from
another what is his, though we want it ourselves, but on the contrary,
relieve and supply his wants; and whenever we have done the contrary we
ought to repent, be sorry, and resolve to do so no more;—when I say,
all men shall be proved actually to know and allow all these and a
thousand other such rules, all of which come under these two general
words made use of above, viz. virtutes et peccata virtues and sins,
there will be more reason for admitting these and the like, for common
notions and practical principles. Yet, after all, universal consent
(were there any in moral principles) to truths, the knowledge whereof
may be attained otherwise, would scarce prove them to be innate; which
is all I contend for.
20. Objection, Innate Principles may be corrupted, answered.
Nor will it be of much moment here to offer that very ready but not
very material answer, viz. that the innate principles of morality may,
by education, and custom, and the general opinion of those amongst whom
we converse, be darkened, and at last quite worn out of the minds of
men. Which assertion of theirs, if true, quite takes away the argument
of universal consent, by which this opinion of innate principles is
endeavoured to be proved; unless those men will think it reasonable
that their private persuasions, or that of their party, should pass for
universal consent;—a thing not unfrequently done, when men, presuming
themselves to be the only masters of right reason, cast by the votes
and opinions of the rest of mankind as not worthy the reckoning. And
then their argument stands thus:—“The principles which all mankind
allow for true, are innate; those that men of right reason admit, are
the principles allowed by all mankind; we, and those of our mind, are
men of reason; therefore, we agreeing, our principles are
innate”;—which is a very pretty way of arguing, and a short cut to
infallibility. For otherwise it will be very hard to understand how
there be some principles which all men do acknowledge and agree in; and
yet there are none of those principles which are not, by depraved
custom and ill education, blotted out of the minds of many men: which
is to say, that all men admit, but yet many men do deny and dissent
from them. And indeed the supposition of SUCH first principles will
serve us to very little purpose; and we shall be as much at a loss with
as without them, if they may, by any human power—such as the will of
our teachers, or opinions of our companions—be altered or lost in us:
and notwithstanding all this boast of first principles and innate
light, we shall be as much in the dark and uncertainty as if there were
no such thing at all: it being all one to have no rule, and one that
will warp any way; or amongst various and contrary rules, not to know
which is the right. But concerning innate principles, I desire these
men to say, whether they can or cannot, by education and custom, be
blurred and blotted out; if they cannot, we must find them in all
mankind alike, and they must be clear in everybody; and if they may
suffer variation from adventitious notions, we must then find them
clearest and most perspicuous nearest the fountain, in children and
illiterate people, who have received least impression from foreign
opinions. Let them take which side they please, they will certainly
find it inconsistent with visible matter of fact and daily observation.
21. Contrary Principles in the World.
I easily grant that there are great numbers of opinions which, by men
of different countries, educations, and tempers, are received and
embraced as first and unquestionable principles; many whereof, both for
their absurdity as well as oppositions to one another, it is impossible
should be true. But yet all those propositions, how remote soever from
reason are so sacred somewhere or other, that men even of good
understanding in other matters, will sooner part with their lives, and
whatever is dearest to them, than suffer themselves to doubt, or others
to question, the truth of them.
22. How men commonly come by their Principles.
This, however strange it may seem, is that which every day’s experience
confirms; and will not, perhaps, appear so wonderful, if we consider
the ways and steps by which it is brought about; and how really it may
come to pass, that doctrines that have been derived from no better
original than the superstition of a nurse, or the authority of an old
woman, may, by length of time and consent of neighbours, grow up to the
dignity of PRINCIPLES in religion or morality. For such, who are
careful (as they call it) to principle children well, (and few there be
who have not a set of those principles for them, which they believe
in,) instil into the unwary, and as yet unprejudiced, understanding,
(for white paper receives any characters,) those doctrines they would
have them retain and profess. These being taught them as soon as they
have any apprehension; and still as they grow up confirmed to them,
either by the open profession or tacit consent of all they have to do
with; or at least by those of whose wisdom, knowledge, and piety they
have an opinion, who never suffer those propositions to be otherwise
mentioned but as the basis and foundation on which they build their
religion and manners, come, by these means, to have the reputation of
unquestionable, self-evident, and innate truths.
23. Principles supposed innate because we do not remember when we began
to hold them.
To which we may add, that when men so instructed are grown up, and
reflect on their own minds, they cannot find anything more ancient
there than those opinions, which were taught them before their memory
began to keep a register of their actions, or date the time when any
new thing appeared to them; and therefore make no scruple to conclude,
that those propositions of whose knowledge they can find in themselves
no original, were certainly the impress of God and nature upon their
minds, and not taught them by any one else. These they entertain and
submit to, as many do to their parents with veneration; not because it
is natural: nor do children do it where they are not so taught; but
because, having been always so educated, and having no remembrance of
the beginning of this respect, they think it is natural.
24. How such principles come to be held.
This will appear very likely, and almost unavoidable to come to pass,
if we consider the nature of mankind and the constitution of human
affairs; wherein most men cannot live without employing their time in
the daily labours of their callings; nor be at quiet in their minds
without SOME foundation or principle to rest their thoughts on. There
is scarcely any one so floating and superficial in his understanding,
who hath not some reverenced propositions, which are to him the
principles on which he bottoms his reasonings, and by which he judgeth
of truth and falsehood, right and wrong; which some, wanting skill and
leisure, and others the inclination, and some being taught that they
ought not to examine, there are few to be found who are not exposed by
their ignorance, laziness, education, or precipitancy, to TAKE THEM
UPON TRUST.
25. Further explained.
This is evidently the case of all children and young folk; and custom,
a greater power than nature, seldom failing to make them worship for
divine what she hath inured them to bow their minds and submit their
understandings to, it is no wonder that grown men, either perplexed in
the necessary affairs of life, or hot in the pursuit of pleasures,
should not seriously sit down to examine their own tenets; especially
when one of their principles is, that principles ought not to be
questioned. And had men leisure, parts, and will, who is there almost
that dare shake the foundations of all his past thoughts and actions,
and endure to bring upon himself the shame of having been a long time
wholly in mistake and error? Who is there hardy enough to contend with
the reproach which is everywhere prepared for those who dare venture to
dissent from the received opinions of their country or party? And where
is the man to be found that can patiently prepare himself to bear the
name of whimsical, sceptical, or atheist; which he is sure to meet
with, who does in the least scruple any of the common opinions? And he
will be much more afraid to question those principles, when he shall
think them, as most men do, the standards set up by God in his mind, to
be the rule and touchstone of all other opinions. And what can hinder
him from thinking them sacred, when he finds them the earliest of all
his own thoughts, and the most reverenced by others?
26. A worship of idols.
It is easy to imagine how, by these means, it comes to pass that men
worship the idols that have been set up in their minds; grow fond of
the notions they have been long acquainted with there; and stamp the
characters of divinity upon absurdities and errors; become zealous
votaries to bulls and monkeys, and contend too, fight, and die in
defence of their opinions. _Dum solos credit habendos esse deos, quos
ipse colit_. For, since the reasoning faculties of the soul, which are
almost constantly, though not always warily nor wisely employed, would
not know how to move, for want of a foundation and footing, in most
men, who through laziness or avocation do not, or for want of time, or
true helps, or for other causes, cannot penetrate into the principles
of knowledge, and trace truth to its fountain and original, it is
natural for them, and almost unavoidable, to take up with some 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.
27. Principles must be examined.
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 examination, 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
a sufficient mark to direct my choice, and assure me of any 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 innate.
CHAPTER IV.
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. 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 IMPOSSIBILE 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. 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 them.
4. Identity, an Idea not innate.
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 asunder? Nay, whether the cock too, which had
the same soul, were not the same, with both of them? 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?
5. What makes the same man?
Nor let any one think that the questions I have here 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.
6. Whole and Part not innate ideas.
Let us examine that principle of mathematics, viz. THAT THE WHOLE IS
BIGGER THAN A PART. This, I take it, is reckoned amongst innate
principles. I am sure it has as good a title as any to be thought so;
which yet nobody can think it to be, when he considers the ideas it
comprehends in it, WHOLE and PART, are perfectly relative; but the
positive ideas to which they properly and immediately belong are
extension and number, of which alone whole and part are relations. So
that if whole and part are innate ideas, extension and number must be
so too; it being impossible to have an idea of a relation, without
having any at all of the thing to which it belongs, and in which it is
founded. Now, whether the minds of men have naturally imprinted on them
the ideas of extension and number, I leave to be considered by those
who are the patrons of innate principles.
7. Idea of Worship not innate.
That GOD IS TO BE WORSHIPPED, is, without doubt, as great a truth as
any that can enter into the mind of man, and deserves the first place
amongst all practical principles. But yet it can by no means be thought
innate, unless the ideas of GOD and WORSHIP are innate. That the idea
the term worship stands for is not in the understanding of children,
and a character stamped on the mind in its first original, I think will
be easily granted, by any one that considers how few there be amongst
grown men who have a clear and distinct notion of it. And, I suppose,
there cannot be anything more ridiculous than to say, that children
have this practical principle innate, “That God is to be worshipped,”
and yet that they know not what that worship of God is, which is their
duty. But to pass by this.
8. Idea of God not innate.
If any idea can be imagined innate, the idea of GOD may, of all others,
for many reasons, be thought so; since it is hard to conceive how there
should be innate moral principles, without an innate idea of a Deity.
Without a notion of a law-maker, it is impossible to have a notion of a
law, and an obligation to observe it. Besides the atheists taken notice
of amongst the ancients, and left branded upon the records of history,
hath not navigation discovered, in these later ages, whole nations, at
the bay of Soldania, in Brazil, and in the Caribbee islands, &c.,
amongst whom there was to be found no notion of a God, no religion?
Nicholaus del Techo, in Literis ex Paraquaria, de Caiguarum
Conversione, has these words: Reperi eam gentem nullum nomen habere
quod Deum, et hominis animam significet; nulla sacra habet, nulla
idola.
And perhaps, if we should with attention mind the lives and discourses
of people not so far off, we should have too much reason to fear, that
many, in more civilized countries, have no very strong and clear
impressions of a Deity upon their minds, and that the complaints of
atheism made from the pulpit are not without reason. And though only
some profligate wretches own it too barefacedly now; yet perhaps we
should hear more than we do of it from others, did not the fear of the
magistrate’s sword, or their neighbour’s censure, tie up people’s
tongues; which, were the apprehensions of punishment or shame taken
away, would as openly proclaim their atheism as their lives do.
9. The name of God not universal or obscure in meaning.
But had all mankind everywhere a notion of a God, (whereof yet history
tells us the contrary,) it would not from thence follow, that the idea
of him was innate. For, though no nation were to be found without a
name, and some few dark notions of him, yet that would not prove them
to be natural impressions on the mind; no more than the names of fire,
or the sun, heat, or number, do prove the ideas they stand for to be
innate; because the names of those things, and the ideas of them, are
so universally received and known amongst mankind. Nor, on the
contrary, is the want of such a name, or the absence of such a notion
out of men’s minds, any argument against the being of a God; any more
than it would be a proof that there was no loadstone in the world,
because a great part of mankind had neither a notion of any such thing
nor a name for it; or be any show of argument to prove that there are
no distinct and various species of angels, or intelligent beings above
us, because we have no ideas of such distinct species, or names for
them. For, men being furnished with words, by the common language of
their own countries, can scarce avoid having some kind of ideas of
those things whose names those they converse with have occasion
frequently to mention to them. And if they carry with it the notion of
excellency, greatness, or something extraordinary; if apprehension and
concernment accompany it; if the fear of absolute and irresistible
power set it on upon the mind,—the idea is likely to sink the deeper,
and spread the further; especially if it be such an idea as is
agreeable to the common light of reason, and naturally deducible from
every part of our knowledge, as that of a God is. For the visible marks
of extraordinary wisdom and power appear so plainly in all the works of
the creation, that a rational creature, who will but seriously reflect
on them, cannot miss the discovery of a Deity. And the influence that
the discovery of such a Being must necessarily have on the minds of all
that have but once heard of it is so great, and carries such a weight
of thought and communication with it, that it seems stranger to me that
a whole nation of men should be anywhere found so brutish as to want
the notion of a God, than that they should be without any notion of
numbers, or fire.
10. Ideas of God and idea of Fire.
The name of God being once mentioned in any part of the world, to
express a superior, powerful, wise, invisible Being, the suitableness
of such a notion to the principles of common reason, and the interest
men will always have to mention it often, must necessarily spread it
far and wide; and continue it down to all generations: though yet the
general reception of this name, and some imperfect and unsteady notions
conveyed thereby to the unthinking part of mankind, prove not the idea
to be innate; but only that they who made the discovery had made a
right use of their reason, thought maturely of the causes of things,
and traced them to their original; from whom other less considering
people having once received so important a notion, it could not easily
be lost again.
11. Idea of God not innate.
This is all could be inferred from the notion of a God, were it to be
found universally in all the tribes of mankind, and generally
acknowledged, by men grown to maturity in all countries. For the
generality of the acknowledging of a God, as I imagine, is extended no
further than that; which, if it be sufficient to prove the idea of God
innate, will as well prove the idea of fire innate; since I think it
may be truly said, that there is not a person in the world who has a
notion of a God, who has not also the idea of fire. I doubt not but if
a colony of young children should be placed in an island where no fire
was, they would certainly neither have any notion of such a thing, nor
name for it, how generally soever it were received and known in all the
world besides; and perhaps too their apprehensions would be as far
removed from any name, or notion, of a God, till some one amongst them
had employed his thoughts to inquire into the constitution and causes
of things, which would easily lead him to the notion of a God; which
having once taught to others, reason, and the natural propensity of
their own thoughts, would afterwards propagate, and continue amongst
them.
12. Suitable to God’s goodness, that all Men should have an idea of
Him, therefore naturally imprinted by Him, answered.
Indeed it is urged, that it is suitable to the goodness of God, to
imprint upon the minds of men characters and notions of himself, and
not to leave them in the dark and doubt in so grand a concernment; and
also, by that means, to secure to himself the homage and veneration due
from so intelligent a creature as man; and therefore he has done it.
This argument, if it be of any force, will prove much more than those
who use it in this case expect from it. For, if we may conclude that
God hath done for men all that men shall judge is best for them,
because it is suitable to his goodness so to do, it will prove, not
only that God has imprinted on the minds of men an idea of himself, but
that he hath plainly stamped there, in fair characters, all that men
ought to know or believe of him; all that they ought to do in obedience
to his will; and that he hath given them a will and affections
conformable to it. This, no doubt, every one will think better for men,
than that they should, in the dark, grope after knowledge, as St. Paul
tells us all nations did after God (Acts xvii. 27); than that their
wills should clash with their understandings, and their appetites cross
their duty. The Romanists say it is best for men, and so suitable to
the goodness of God, that there should be an infallible judge of
controversies on earth; and therefore there is one. And I, by the same
reason, say it is better for men that every man himself should be
infallible. I leave them to consider, whether, by the force of this
argument, they shall think that every man IS so. I think it a very good
argument to say,—the infinitely wise God hath made it so; and therefore
it is best. But it seems to me a little too much confidence of our own
wisdom to say,—‘I think it best; and therefore God hath made it so.’
And in the matter in hand, it will be in vain to argue from such a
topic, that God hath done so, when certain experience shows us that he
hath not. But the goodness of God hath not been wanting to men, without
such original impressions of knowledge or ideas stamped on the mind;
since he hath furnished man with those faculties which will serve for
the sufficient discovery of all things requisite to the end of such a
being; and I doubt not but to show, that a man, by the right use of his
natural abilities, may, without any innate principles, attain a
knowledge of a God, and other things that concern him. God having
endued man with those faculties of knowledge which he hath, was no more
obliged by his goodness to plant those innate notions in his mind, than
that, having given him reason, hands, and materials, he should build
him bridges or houses,—which some people in the world, however of good
parts, do either totally want, or are but ill provided of, as well as
others are wholly without ideas of God and principles of morality, or
at least have but very ill ones; the reason in both cases being, that
they never employed their parts, faculties, and powers industriously
that way, but contented themselves with the opinions, fashions, and
things of their country, as they found them, without looking any
further. Had you or I been born at the Bay of Soldania, possibly our
thoughts and notions had not exceeded those brutish ones of the
Hottentots that inhabit there. And had the Virginia king Apochancana
been educated in England, he had been perhaps as knowing a divine, and
as good a mathematician as any in it; the difference between him and a
more improved Englishman lying barely in this, that the exercise of his
faculties was bounded within the ways, modes, and notions of his own
country, and never directed to any other or further inquiries. And if
he had not any idea of a God, it was only because he pursued not those
thoughts that would have led him to it.
13. Ideas of God various in different Men.
I grant that if there were any ideas to be found imprinted on the minds
of men, we have reason to expect it should be the notion of his Maker,
as a mark God set on his own workmanship, to mind man of his dependence
and duty; and that herein should appear the first instances of human
knowledge. But how late is it before any such notion is discoverable in
children? And when we find it there, how much more does it resemble the
opinion and notion of the teacher, than represent the true God? He that
shall observe in children the progress whereby their minds attain the
knowledge they have, will think that the objects they do first and most
familiarly converse with are those that make the first impressions on
their understandings; nor will he find the least footsteps of any
other. It is easy to take notice how their thoughts enlarge themselves,
only as they come to be acquainted with a greater variety of sensible
objects; to retain the ideas of them in their memories; and to get the
skill to compound and enlarge them, and several ways put them together.
How, by these means, they come to frame in their minds an idea men have
of a Deity, I shall hereafter show.
14. Contrary and inconsistent ideas of God under the same name.
Can it be thought that the ideas men have of God are the characters and
marks of himself, engraven in their minds by his own finger, when we
see that, in the same country, under one and the same name, men have
far different, nay often contrary and inconsistent ideas and
conceptions of him? Their agreeing in a name, or sound, will scarce
prove an innate notion of him.
15. Gross ideas of God.
What true or tolerable notion of a Deity could they have, who
acknowledged and worshipped hundreds? Every deity that they owned above
one was an infallible evidence of their ignorance of Him, and a proof
that they had no true notion of God, where unity, infinity, and
eternity were excluded. To which, if we add their gross conceptions of
corporeity, expressed in their images and representations of their
deities; the amours, marriages, copulations, lusts, quarrels, and other
mean qualities attributed by them to their gods; we shall have little
reason to think that the heathen world, i.e. the greatest part of
mankind, had such ideas of God in their minds as he himself, out of
care that they should not be mistaken about him, was author of. And
this universality of consent, so much argued, if it prove any native
impressions, it will be only this:—that God imprinted on the minds of
all men speaking the same language, a NAME for himself, but not any
IDEA; since those people who agreed in the name, had, at the same time,
far different apprehensions about the thing signified. If they say that
the variety of deities worshipped by the heathen world were but
figurative ways of expressing the several attributes of that
incomprehensible Being, or several parts of his providence, I answer:
what they might be in the original I will not here inquire; but that
they were so in the thoughts of the vulgar I think nobody will affirm.
And he that will consult the voyage of the Bishop of Beryte, c. 13,
(not to mention other testimonies,) will find that the theology of the
Siamites professedly owns a plurality of gods: or, as the Abbe de
Choisy more judiciously remarks in his Journal du Voyage de Siam,
107/177, it consists properly in acknowledging no God at all.
16. Idea of God not innate although wise men of all nations come to
have it.
If it be said, that wise men of all nations came to have true
conceptions of the unity and infinity of the Deity, I grant it. But
then this,
First, excludes universality of consent in anything but the name; for
those wise men being very few, perhaps one of a thousand, this
universality is very narrow.
Secondly, it seems to me plainly to prove, that the truest and best
notions men have of God were not imprinted, but acquired by thought and
meditation, and a right use of their faculties: since the wise and
considerate men of the world, by a right and careful employment of
their thoughts and reason, attained true notions in this as well as
other things; whilst the lazy and inconsiderate part of men, making far
the greater number, took up their notions by chance, from common
tradition and vulgar conceptions, without much beating their heads
about them. And if it be a reason to think the notion of God innate,
because all wise men had it, virtue too must be thought innate; for
that also wise men have always had.
17. Odd, low, and pitiful ideas of God common among men.
This was evidently the case of all Gentilism. Nor hath even amongst
Jews, Christians, and Mahometans, who acknowledged but one God, this
doctrine, and the care taken in those nations to teach men to have true
notions of a God, prevailed so far as to make men to have the same and
the true ideas of him. How many even amongst us, will be found upon
inquiry to fancy him in the shape of a man sitting in heaven; and to
have many other absurd and unfit conceptions of him? Christians as well
as Turks have had whole sects owning and contending earnestly for
it,—that the Deity was corporeal, and of human shape: and though we
find few now amongst us who profess themselves Anthropomorphites,
(though some I have met with that own it,) yet I believe he that will
make it his business may find amongst the ignorant and uninstructed
Christians many of that opinion. Talk but with country people, almost
of any age, or young people almost of any condition, and you shall find
that, though the name of God be frequently in their mouths, yet the
notions they apply this name to are so odd, low, and pitiful, that
nobody can imagine they were taught by a rational man; much less that
they were characters written by the finger of God himself. Nor do I see
how it derogates more from the goodness of God, that he has given us
minds unfurnished with these ideas of himself, than that he hath sent
us into the world with bodies unclothed; and that there is no art or
skill born with us. For, being fitted with faculties to attain these,
it is want of industry and consideration in us, and not of bounty in
him, if we have them not. It is as certain that there is a God, as that
the opposite angles made by the intersection of two straight lines are
equal. There was never any rational creature that set himself sincerely
to examine the truth of these propositions that could fail to assent to
them; though yet it be past doubt that there are many men, who, having
not applied their thoughts that way, are ignorant both of the one and
the other. If any one think fit to call this (which is the utmost of
its extent) UNIVERSAL CONSENT, such an one I easily allow; but such an
universal consent as this proves not the idea of God, any more than it
does the idea of such angles, innate.
18. If the Idea of God be not innate, no other can be supposed innate.
Since then though the knowledge of a God be the most natural discovery
of human reason, yet the idea of him is not innate, as I think is
evident from what has been said; I imagine there will be scarce any
other idea found that can pretend to it. Since if God hath set any
impression, any character, on the understanding of men, it is most
reasonable to expect it should have been some clear and uniform idea of
Himself; as far as our weak capacities were capable to receive so
incomprehensible and infinite an object. But our minds being at first
void of that idea which we are most concerned to have, it is a strong
presumption against all other innate characters. I must own, as far as
I can observe, I can find none, and would be glad to be informed by any
other.
19. Idea of Substance not innate.
I confess there is another idea which would be of general use for
mankind to have, as it is of general talk as if they had it; and that
is the idea of SUBSTANCE; which we neither have nor can have by
sensation or reflection. If nature took care to provide us any ideas,
we might well expect they should be such as by our own faculties we
cannot procure to ourselves; but we see, on the contrary, that since,
by those ways whereby other ideas are brought into our minds, this is
not, we have no such clear idea at all; and therefore signify nothing
by the word SUBSTANCE but only an uncertain supposition of we know not
what, i. e. of something whereof we have no idea, which we take to be
the substratum, or support, of those ideas we do know.
20. No Propositions can be innate, since no Ideas are innate.
Whatever then we talk of innate, either speculative or practical,
principles, it may with as much probability be said, that a man hath
100 pounds sterling in his pocket, and yet denied that he hath there
either penny, shilling, crown, or other coin out of which the sum is to
be made up; as to think that certain PROPOSITIONS are innate when the
IDEAS about which they are can by no means be supposed to be so. The
general reception and assent that is given doth not at all prove, that
the ideas expressed in them are innate; for in many cases, however the
ideas came there, the assent to words expressing the agreement or
disagreement of such ideas, will necessarily follow. Every one that
hath a true idea of GOD and WORSHIP, will assent to this proposition,
‘That God is to be worshipped,’ when expressed in a language he
understands; and every rational man that hath not thought on it to-day,
may be ready to assent to this proposition to-morrow; and yet millions
of men may be well supposed to want one or both those ideas to-day.
For, if we will allow savages, and most country people, to have ideas
of God and worship, (which conversation with them will not make one
forward to believe,) yet I think few children can be supposed to have
those ideas, which therefore they must begin to have some time or
other; and then they will also begin to assent to that proposition, and
make very little question of it ever after. But such an assent upon
hearing, no more proves the IDEAS to be innate, than it does that one
born blind (with cataracts which will be couched to-morrow) had the
innate ideas of the sun, or light, or saffron, or yellow; because, when
his sight is cleared, he will certainly assent to this proposition,
“That the sun is lucid, or that saffron is yellow.” And therefore, if
such an assent upon hearing cannot prove the ideas innate, it can much
less the PROPOSITIONS made up of those ideas. If they have any innate
ideas, I would be glad to be told what, and how many, they are.
21. No innate Ideas in the Memory.
To which let me add: if there be any innate ideas, any ideas in the
mind which the mind does not actually think on, they must be lodged in
the memory; and from thence must be brought into view by remembrance;
i. e. must be known, when they are remembered, to have been perceptions
in the mind before; unless remembrance can be without remembrance. For,
to remember is to perceive anything with memory, or with a
consciousness that it was perceived or known before. Without this,
whatever idea comes into the mind is new, and not remembered; this
consciousness of its having been in the mind before, being that which
distinguishes remembering from all other ways of thinking. Whatever
idea was never PERCEIVED by the mind was never in the mind. Whatever
idea is in the mind, is, either an actual perception, or else, having
been an actual perception, is so in the mind that, by the memory, it
can be made an actual perception again. Whenever there is the actual
perception of any idea without memory, the idea appears perfectly new
and unknown before to the understanding. Whenever the memory brings any
idea into actual view, it is with a consciousness that it had been
there before, and was not wholly a stranger to the mind. Whether this
be not so, I appeal to every one’s observation. And then I desire an
instance of an idea, pretended to be innate, which (before any
impression of it by ways hereafter to be mentioned) any one could
revive and remember, as an idea he had formerly known; without which
consciousness of a former perception there is no remembrance; and
whatever idea comes into the mind without THAT consciousness is not
remembered, or comes not out of the memory, nor can be said to be in
the mind before that appearance. For what is not either actually in
view or in the memory, is in the mind no way at all, and is all one as
if it had never been there. Suppose a child had the use of his eyes
till he knows and distinguishes colours; but then cataracts shut the
windows, and he is forty or fifty years perfectly in the dark; and in
that time perfectly loses all memory of the ideas of colours he once
had. This was the case of a blind man I once talked with, who lost his
sight by the small-pox when he was a child, and had no more notion of
colours than one born blind. I ask whether any one can say this man had
then any ideas of colours in his mind, any more than one born blind?
And I think nobody will say that either of them had in his mind any
ideas of colours at all. His cataracts are couched, and then he has the
ideas (which he remembers not) of colours, DE NOVO, by his restored
sight, conveyed to his mind, and that without any consciousness of a
former acquaintance. And these now he can revive and call to mind in
the dark. In this case all these ideas of colours which, when out of
view, can be revived with a consciousness of a former acquaintance,
being thus in the memory, are said to be in the mind. The use I make of
this is,—that whatever idea, being not actually in view, is in the
mind, is there only by being in the memory; and if it be not in the
memory, it is not in the mind; and if it be in the memory, it cannot by
the memory be brought into actual view without a perception that it
comes out of the memory; which is this, that it had been known before,
and is now remembered. If therefore there be any innate ideas, they
must be in the memory, or else nowhere in the mind; and if they be in
the memory, they can be revived without any impression from without;
and whenever they are brought into the mind they are remembered, i. e.
they bring with them a perception of their not being wholly new to it.
This being a constant and distinguishing difference between what is,
and what is not in the memory, or in the mind;—that what is not in the
memory, whenever it appears there, appears perfectly new and unknown
before; and what is in the memory, or in the mind, whenever it is
suggested by the memory, appears not to be new, but the mind finds it
in itself, and knows it was there before. By this it may be tried
whether there be any innate ideas in the mind before impression from
sensation or reflection. I would fain meet with the man who, when he
came to the use of reason, or at any other time, remembered any of
them; and to whom, after he was born, they were never new. If any one
will say, there are ideas in the mind that are NOT in the memory, I
desire him to explain himself, and make what he says intelligible.
22. Principles not innate, because of little use or little certainty.
Besides what I have already said, there is another reason why I doubt
that neither these nor any other principles are innate. I that am fully
persuaded that the infinitely wise God made all things in perfect
wisdom, cannot satisfy myself why he should be supposed to print upon
the minds of men some universal principles; whereof those that are
pretended innate, and concern SPECULATION, are of no great use; and
those that concern PRACTICE, not self-evident; and neither of them
distinguishable from some other truths not allowed to be innate. For,
to what purpose should characters be graven on the mind by the finger
of God, which are not clearer there than those which are afterwards
introduced, or cannot be distinguished from them? If any one thinks
there are such innate ideas and propositions, which by their clearness
and usefulness are distinguishable from all that is adventitious in the
mind and acquired, it will not be a hard matter for him to tell us
WHICH THEY ARE; and then every one will be a fit judge whether they be
so or no. Since if there be such innate ideas and impressions, plainly
different from all other perceptions and knowledge, every one will find
it true in himself. Of the evidence of these supposed innate maxims, I
have spoken already: of their usefulness I shall have occasion to speak
more hereafter.
23. Difference of Men’s Discoveries depends upon the different
Application of their Faculties.
To conclude: some ideas forwardly offer themselves to all men’s
understanding; and some sorts of truths result from any ideas, as soon
as the mind puts them into propositions: other truths require a train
of ideas placed in order, a due comparing of them, and deductions made
with attention, before they can be discovered and assented to. Some of
the first sort, because of their general and easy reception, have been
mistaken for innate: but the truth is, ideas and notions are no more
born with us than arts and sciences; though some of them indeed offer
themselves to our faculties more readily than others; and therefore are
more generally received: though that too be according as the organs of
our bodies and powers of our minds happen to be employed; God having
fitted men with faculties and means to discover, receive, and retain
truths, according as they are employed. The great difference that is to
be found in the notions of mankind is, from the different use they put
their faculties to. Whilst some (and those the most) taking things upon
trust, misemploy their power of assent, by lazily enslaving their minds
to the dictates and dominion of others, in doctrines which it is their
duty carefully to examine, and not blindly, with an implicit faith, to
swallow; others, employing their thoughts only about some few things,
grow acquainted sufficiently with them, attain great degrees of
knowledge in them, and are ignorant of all other, having never let
their thoughts loose in the search of other inquiries. Thus, that the
three angles of a triangle are quite equal to two right ones is a truth
as certain as anything can be, and I think more evident than many of
those propositions that go for principles; and yet there are millions,
however expert in other things, who know not this at all, because they
never set their thoughts on work about such angles. And he that
certainly knows this proposition may yet be utterly ignorant of the
truth of other propositions, in mathematics itself, which are as clear
and evident as this; because, in his search of those mathematical
truths, he stopped his thoughts short and went not so far. The same may
happen concerning the notions we have of the being of a Deity. For,
though there be no truth which a man may more evidently make out to
himself than the existence of a God, yet he that shall content himself
with things as he finds them in this world, as they minister to his
pleasures and passions, and not make inquiry a little further into
their causes, ends, and admirable contrivances, and pursue the thoughts
thereof with diligence and attention, may live long without any notion
of such a Being. And if any person hath by talk put such a notion into
his head, he may perhaps believe it; but if he hath never examined it,
his knowledge of it will be no perfecter than his, who having been
told, that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right ones,
takes it upon trust, without examining the demonstration; and may yield
his assent as a probable opinion, but hath no knowledge of the truth of
it; which yet his faculties, if carefully employed, were able to make
clear and evident to him. But this only, by the by, to show how much
OUR KNOWLEDGE DEPENDS UPON THE RIGHT USE OF THOSE POWERS NATURE HATH
BESTOWED UPON US, and how little upon SUCH INNATE PRINCIPLES AS ARE IN
VAIN SUPPOSED TO BE IN ALL MANKIND FOR THEIR DIRECTION; which all men
could not but know if they were there, or else they would be there to
no purpose. And which since all men do not know, nor can distinguish
from other adventitious truths, we may well conclude there are no such.
24. Men must think and know for themselves.
What censure doubting thus of innate principles may deserve from men,
who will be apt to call it pulling up the old foundations of knowledge
and certainty, I cannot tell;—I persuade myself at least that the way I
have pursued, being conformable to truth, lays those foundations surer.
This I am certain, I have not made it my business either to quit or
follow any authority in the ensuing Discourse. Truth has been my only
aim; and wherever that has appeared to lead, my thoughts have
impartially followed, without minding whether the footsteps of any
other lay that way or not. Not that I want a due respect to other men’s
opinions; but, after all, the greatest reverence is due to truth: and I
hope it will not be thought arrogance to say, that perhaps we should
make greater progress in the discovery of rational and contemplative
knowledge, if we sought it in the fountain, IN THE CONSIDERATION OF
THINGS THEMSELVES; and made use rather of our own thoughts than other
men’s to find it. For I think we may as rationally hope to see with
other men’s eyes, as to know by other men’s understandings. So much as
we ourselves consider and comprehend of truth and reason, so much we
possess of real and true knowledge. The floating of other men’s
opinions in our brains, makes us not one jot the more knowing, though
they happen to be true. What in them was science, is in us but
opiniatrety; whilst we give up our assent only to reverend names, and
do not, as they did, employ our own reason to understand those truths
which gave them reputation. Aristotle was certainly a knowing man, but
nobody ever thought him so because he blindly embraced, and confidently
vented the opinions of another. And if the taking up of another’s
principles, without examining them, made not him a philosopher, I
suppose it will hardly make anybody else so. In the sciences, every one
has so much as he really knows and comprehends. What he believes only,
and takes upon trust, are but shreds; which, however well in the whole
piece, make no considerable addition to his stock who gathers them.
Such borrowed wealth, like fairy money, though it were gold in the hand
from which he received it, will be but leaves and dust when it comes to
use.
25. Whence the Opinion of Innate Principles.
When men have found some general propositions that could not be doubted
of as soon as understood, it was, I know, a short and easy way to
conclude them innate. This being once received, it eased the lazy from
the pains of search, and stopped the inquiry of the doubtful concerning
all that was once styled innate. And it was of no small advantage to
those who affected to be masters and teachers, to make this the
principle of principles,—THAT PRINCIPLES MUST NOT BE QUESTIONED. For,
having once established this tenet,—that there are innate principles,
it put their followers upon a necessity of receiving SOME doctrines as
such; which was to take them off from the use of their own reason and
judgment, and put them on believing and taking them upon trust without
further examination: in which posture of blind credulity, they might be
more easily governed by, and made useful to some sort of men, who had
the skill and office to principle and guide them. Nor is it a small
power it gives one man over another, to have the authority to be the
dictator of principles, and teacher of unquestionable truths; and to
make a man swallow that for an innate principle which may serve to his
purpose who teacheth them. Whereas had they examined the ways whereby
men came to the knowledge of many universal truths, they would have
found them to result in the minds of men from the being of things
themselves, when duly considered; and that they were discovered by the
application of those faculties that were fitted by nature to receive
and judge of them, when duly employed about them.
26. Conclusion.
To show HOW the understanding proceeds herein is the design of the
following Discourse; which I shall proceed to when I have first
premised, that hitherto,—to clear my way to those foundations which I
conceive are the only true ones, whereon to establish those notions we
can have of our own knowledge,—it hath been necessary for me to give an
account of the reasons I had to doubt of innate principles. And since
the arguments which are against them do, some of them, rise from common
received opinions, I have been forced to take several things for
granted; which is hardly avoidable to any one, whose task is to show
the falsehood or improbability of any tenet;—it happening in
controversial discourses as it does in assaulting of towns; where, if
the ground be but firm whereon the batteries are erected, there is no
further inquiry of whom it is borrowed, nor whom it belongs to, so it
affords but a fit rise for the present purpose. But in the future part
of this Discourse, designing to raise an edifice uniform and consistent
with itself, as far as my own experience and observation will assist
me, I hope to erect it on such a basis that I shall not need to shore
it up with props and buttresses, leaning on borrowed or begged
foundations: or at least, if mine prove a castle in the air, I will
endeavour it shall be all of a piece and hang together. Wherein I warn
the reader not to expect undeniable cogent demonstrations, unless I may
be allowed the privilege, not seldom assumed by others, to take my
principles for granted; and then, I doubt not, but I can demonstrate
too. All that I shall say for the principles I proceed on is, that I
can only appeal to men’s own unprejudiced experience and observation
whether they be true or not; and this is enough for a man who professes
no more than to lay down candidly and freely his own conjectures,
concerning a subject lying somewhat in the dark, without any other
design than an unbiassed inquiry after truth.
BOOK II
OF IDEAS
CHAPTER I.
OF IDEAS IN GENERAL, AND THEIR ORIGINAL.
1. Idea is the Object of Thinking.
Every man being conscious to himself that he thinks; and that which his
mind is applied about whilst thinking being the IDEAS that are there,
it is past doubt that men have in their minds several ideas,—such as
are those expressed by the words whiteness, hardness, sweetness,
thinking, motion, man, elephant, army, drunkenness, and others: it is
in the first place then to be inquired, HOW HE COMES BY THEM?
I know it is a received doctrine, that men have native ideas, and
original characters, stamped upon their minds in their very first
being. This opinion I have at large examined already; and, I suppose
what I have said in the foregoing Book will be much more easily
admitted, when I have shown whence the understanding may get all the
ideas it has; and by what ways and degrees they may come into the
mind;—for which I shall appeal to every one’s own observation and
experience.
2. All Ideas come from Sensation or Reflection.
Let us then suppose the mind to be, as we say, white paper, void of all
characters, without any ideas:—How comes it to be furnished? Whence
comes it by that vast store which the busy and boundless fancy of man
has painted on it with an almost endless variety? Whence has it all the
MATERIALS of reason and knowledge? To this I answer, in one word, from
EXPERIENCE. In that all our knowledge is founded; and from that it
ultimately derives itself. Our observation employed either, about
external sensible objects, or about the internal operations of our
minds perceived and reflected on by ourselves, is that which supplies
our understandings with all the MATERIALS of thinking. These two are
the fountains of knowledge, from whence all the ideas we have, or can
naturally have, do spring.
3. The Objects of Sensation one Source of Ideas
First, our Senses, conversant about particular sensible objects, do
convey into the mind several distinct perceptions of things, according
to those various ways wherein those objects do affect them. And thus we
come by those IDEAS we have of yellow, white, heat, cold, soft, hard,
bitter, sweet, and all those which we call sensible qualities; which
when I say the senses convey into the mind, I mean, they from external
objects convey into the mind what produces there those perceptions.
This great source of most of the ideas we have, depending wholly upon
our senses, and derived by them to the understanding, I call SENSATION.
4. The Operations of our Minds, the other Source of them.
Secondly, the other fountain from which experience furnisheth the
understanding with ideas is,—the perception of the operations of our
own mind within us, as it is employed about the ideas it has got;—which
operations, when the soul comes to reflect on and consider, do furnish
the understanding with another set of ideas, which could not be had
from things without. And such are perception, thinking, doubting,
believing, reasoning, knowing, willing, and all the different actings
of our own minds;—which we being conscious of, and observing in
ourselves, do from these receive into our understandings as distinct
ideas as we do from bodies affecting our senses. This source of ideas
every man has wholly in himself; and though it be not sense, as having
nothing to do with external objects, yet it is very like it, and might
properly enough be called INTERNAL SENSE. But as I call the other
Sensation, so I call this REFLECTION, the ideas it affords being such
only as the mind gets by reflecting on its own operations within
itself. By reflection then, in the following part of this discourse, I
would be understood to mean, that notice which the mind takes of its
own operations, and the manner of them, by reason whereof there come to
be ideas of these operations in the understanding. These two, I say,
viz. external material things, as the objects of SENSATION, and the
operations of our own minds within, as the objects of REFLECTION, are
to me the only originals from whence all our ideas take their
beginnings. The term OPERATIONS here I use in a large sense, as
comprehending not barely the actions of the mind about its ideas, but
some sort of passions arising sometimes from them, such as is the
satisfaction or uneasiness arising from any thought.
5. All our Ideas are of the one or of the other of these.
The understanding seems to me not to have the least glimmering of any
ideas which it doth not receive from one of these two. EXTERNAL OBJECTS
furnish the mind with the ideas of sensible qualities, which are all
those different perceptions they produce in us; and THE MIND furnishes
the understanding with ideas of its own operations.
These, when we have taken a full survey of them, and their several
modes, and the compositions made out of them we shall find to contain
all our whole stock of ideas; and that we have nothing in our minds
which did not come in one of these two ways. Let any one examine his
own thoughts, and thoroughly search into his understanding; and then
let him tell me, whether all the original ideas he has there, are any
other than of the objects of his senses, or of the operations of his
mind, considered as objects of his reflection. And how great a mass of
knowledge soever he imagines to be lodged there, he will, upon taking a
strict view, see that he has not any idea in his mind but what one of
these two have imprinted;—though perhaps, with infinite variety
compounded and enlarged by the understanding, as we shall see
hereafter.
6. Observable in Children.
He that attentively considers the state of a child, at his first coming
into the world, will have little reason to think him stored with plenty
of ideas, that are to be the matter of his future knowledge. It is BY
DEGREES he comes to be furnished with them. And though the ideas of
obvious and familiar qualities imprint themselves before the memory
begins to keep a register of time or order, yet it is often so late
before some unusual qualities come in the way, that there are few men
that cannot recollect the beginning of their acquaintance with them.
And if it were worth while, no doubt a child might be so ordered as to
have but a very few, even of the ordinary ideas, till he were grown up
to a man. But all that are born into the world, being surrounded with
bodies that perpetually and diversely affect them, variety of ideas,
whether care be taken of it or not, are imprinted on the minds of
children. Light and colours are busy at hand everywhere, when the eye
is but open; sounds and some tangible qualities fail not to solicit
their proper senses, and force an entrance to the mind;—but yet, I
think, it will be granted easily, that if a child were kept in a place
where he never saw any other but black and white till he were a man, he
would have no more ideas of scarlet or green, than he that from his
childhood never tasted an oyster, or a pine-apple, has of those
particular relishes.
7. Men are differently furnished with these, according to the different
Objects they converse with.
Men then come to be furnished with fewer or more simple ideas from
without, according as the objects they converse with afford greater or
less variety; and from the operations of their minds within, according
as they more or less reflect on them. For, though he that contemplates
the operations of his mind, cannot but have plain and clear ideas of
them; yet, unless he turn his thoughts that way, and considers them
ATTENTIVELY, he will no more have clear and distinct ideas of all the
operations of his mind, and all that may be observed therein, than he
will have all the particular ideas of any landscape, or of the parts
and motions of a clock, who will not turn his eyes to it, and with
attention heed all the parts of it. The picture, or clock may be so
placed, that they may come in his way every day; but yet he will have
but a confused idea of all the parts they are made up of, till he
applies himself with attention, to consider them each in particular.
8. Ideas of Reflection later, because they need Attention.
And hence we see the reason why it is pretty late before most children
get ideas of the operations of their own minds; and some have not any
very clear or perfect ideas of the greatest part of them all their
lives. Because, though they pass there continually, yet, like floating
visions, they make not deep impressions enough to leave in their mind
clear, distinct, lasting ideas, till the understanding turns inward
upon itself, reflects on its own operations, and makes them the objects
of its own contemplation. Children when they come first into it, are
surrounded with a world of new things which, by a constant solicitation
of their senses, draw the mind constantly to them; forward to take
notice of new, and apt to be delighted with the variety of changing
objects. Thus the first years are usually employed and diverted in
looking abroad. Men’s business in them is to acquaint themselves with
what is to be found without; and so growing up in a constant attention
to outward sensations, seldom make any considerable reflection on what
passes within them, till they come to be of riper years; and some
scarce ever at all.
9. The Soul begins to have Ideas when it begins to perceive.
To ask, at what TIME a man has first any ideas, is to ask, when he
begins to perceive;—HAVING IDEAS, and PERCEPTION, being the same thing.
I know it is an opinion, that the soul always thinks, and that it has
the actual perception of ideas in itself constantly, as long as it
exists; and that actual thinking is as inseparable from the soul as
actual extension is from the body; which if true, to inquire after the
beginning of a man’s ideas is the same as to inquire after the
beginning of his soul. For, by this account, soul and its ideas, as
body and its extension, will begin to exist both at the same time.
10. The Soul thinks not always; for this wants Proofs.
But whether the soul be supposed to exist antecedent to, or coeval
with, or some time after the first rudiments of organization, or the
beginnings of life in the body, I leave to be disputed by those who
have better thought of that matter. I confess myself to have one of
those dull souls, that doth not perceive itself always to contemplate
ideas; nor can conceive it any more necessary for the soul always to
think, than for the body always to move: the perception of ideas being
(as I conceive) to the soul, what motion is to the body; not its
essence, but one of its operations. And therefore, though thinking be
supposed never so much the proper action of the soul, yet it is not
necessary to suppose that it should be always thinking, always in
action. That, perhaps, is the privilege of the infinite Author and
Preserver of all things, who “never slumbers nor sleeps”; but is not
competent to any finite being, at least not to the soul of man. We know
certainly, by experience, that we SOMETIMES think; and thence draw this
infallible consequence,—that there is something in us that has a power
to think. But whether that substance PERPETUALLY thinks or no, we can
be no further assured than experience informs us. For, to say that
actual thinking is essential to the soul, and inseparable from it, is
to beg what is in question, and not to prove it by reason;—which is
necessary to be done, if it be not a self-evident proposition. But
whether this, “That the soul always thinks,” be a self-evident
proposition, that everybody assents to at first hearing, I appeal to
mankind. It is doubted whether I thought at all last night or no. The
question being about a matter of fact, it is begging it to bring, as a
proof for it, an hypothesis, which is the very thing in dispute: by
which way one may prove anything, and it is but supposing that all
watches, whilst the balance beats, think, and it is sufficiently
proved, and past doubt, that my watch thought all last night. But he
that would not deceive himself, ought to build his hypothesis on matter
of fact, and make it out by sensible experience, and not presume on
matter of fact, because of his hypothesis, that is, because he supposes
it to be so; which way of proving amounts to this, that I must
necessarily think all last night, because another supposes I always
think, though I myself cannot perceive that I always do so.
But men in love with their opinions may not only suppose what is in
question, but allege wrong matter of fact. How else could any one make
it an inference of mine, that a thing is not, because we are not
sensible of it in our sleep? I do not say there is no SOUL in a man,
because he is not sensible of it in his sleep; but I do say, he cannot
THINK at any time, waking or sleeping, without being sensible of it.
Our being sensible of it is not necessary to anything but to our
thoughts; and to them it is; and to them it always will be necessary,
till we can think without being conscious of it.
11. It is not always conscious of it.
I grant that the soul, in a waking man, is never without thought,
because it is the condition of being awake. But whether sleeping
without dreaming be not an affection of the whole man, mind as well as
body, may be worth a waking man’s consideration; it being hard to
conceive that anything should think and not be conscious of it. If the
soul doth think in a sleeping man without being conscious of it, I ask
whether, during such thinking, it has any pleasure or pain, or be
capable of happiness or misery? I am sure the man is not; no more than
the bed or earth he lies on. For to be happy or miserable without being
conscious of it, seems to me utterly inconsistent and impossible. Or if
it be possible that the SOUL can, whilst the body is sleeping, have its
thinking, enjoyments, and concerns, its pleasures or pain, apart, which
the MAN is not conscious of nor partakes in,—it is certain that
Socrates asleep and Socrates awake is not the same person; but his soul
when he sleeps, and Socrates the man, consisting of body and soul, when
he is waking, are two persons: since waking Socrates has no knowledge
of, or concernment for that happiness or misery of his soul, which it
enjoys alone by itself whilst he sleeps, without perceiving anything of
it; no more than he has for the happiness or misery of a man in the
Indies, whom he knows not. For, if we take wholly away all
consciousness of our actions and sensations, especially of pleasure and
pain, and the concernment that accompanies it, it will be hard to know
wherein to place personal identity.
12. If a sleeping Man thinks without knowing it, the sleeping and
waking Man are two Persons.
The soul, during sound sleep, thinks, say these men. Whilst it thinks
and perceives, it is capable certainly of those of delight or trouble,
as well as any other perceptions; and IT must necessarily be CONSCIOUS
of its own perceptions. But it has all this apart: the sleeping MAN, it
is plain, is conscious of nothing of all this. Let us suppose, then,
the soul of Castor, while he is sleeping, retired from his body; which
is no impossible supposition for the men I have here to do with, who so
liberally allow life, without a thinking soul, to all other animals.
These men cannot then judge it impossible, or a contradiction, that the
body should live without the soul; nor that the soul should subsist and
think, or have perception, even perception of happiness or misery,
without the body. Let us then, I say, suppose the soul of Castor
separated during his sleep from his body, to think apart. Let us
suppose, too, that it chooses for its scene of thinking the body of
another man, v. g. Pollux, who is sleeping without a soul. For, if
Castor’s soul can think, whilst Castor is asleep, what Castor is never
conscious of, it is no matter what PLACE it chooses to think in. We
have here, then, the bodies of two men with only one soul between them,
which we will suppose to sleep and wake by turns; and the soul still
thinking in the waking man, whereof the sleeping man is never
conscious, has never the least perception. I ask, then, whether Castor
and Pollux, thus with only one soul between them, which thinks and
perceives in one what the other is never conscious of, nor is concerned
for, are not two as distinct PERSONS as Castor and Hercules, or as
Socrates and Plato were? And whether one of them might not be very
happy, and the other very miserable? Just by the same reason, they make
the soul and the man two persons, who make the soul think apart what
the man is not conscious of. For, I suppose nobody will make identity
of persons to consist in the soul’s being united to the very same
numerical particles of matter. For if that be necessary to identity, it
will be impossible, in that constant flux of the particles of our
bodies, that any man should be the same person two days, or two
moments, together.
13. Impossible to convince those that sleep without dreaming, that they
think.
Thus, methinks, every drowsy nod shakes their doctrine, who teach that
the soul is always thinking. Those, at least, who do at any time SLEEP
WITHOUT DREAMING, can never be convinced that their thoughts are
sometimes for four hours busy without their knowing of it; and if they
are taken in the very act, waked in the middle of that sleeping
contemplation, can give no manner of account of it.
14. That men dream without remembering it, in vain urged.
It will perhaps be said,—That the soul thinks even in the soundest
sleep, but the MEMORY retains it not. That the soul in a sleeping man
should be this moment busy a thinking, and the next moment in a waking
man not remember nor be able to recollect one jot of all those
thoughts, is very hard to be conceived, and would need some better
proof than bare assertion to make it be believed. For who can without
any more ado, but being barely told so, imagine that the greatest part
of men do, during all their lives, for several hours every day, think
of something, which if they were asked, even in the middle of these
thoughts, they could remember nothing at all of? Most men, I think,
pass a great part of their sleep without dreaming. I once knew a man
that was bred a scholar, and had no bad memory, who told me he had
never dreamed in his life, till he had that fever he was then newly
recovered of, which was about the five or six and twentieth year of his
age. I suppose the world affords more such instances: at least every
one’s acquaintance will furnish him with examples enough of such as
pass most of their nights without dreaming.
15. Upon this Hypothesis, the Thoughts of a sleeping Man ought to be
most rational.
To think often, and never to retain it so much as one moment, is a very
useless sort of thinking; and the soul, in such a state of thinking,
does very little, if at all, excel that of a looking-glass, which
constantly receives variety of images, or ideas, but retains none; they
disappear and vanish, and there remain no footsteps of them; the
looking-glass is never the better for such ideas, nor the soul for such
thoughts. Perhaps it will be said, that in a waking MAN the materials
of the body are employed, and made use of, in thinking; and that the
memory of thoughts is retained by the impressions that are made on the
brain, and the traces there left after such thinking; but that in the
thinking of the SOUL, which is not perceived in a sleeping man, there
the soul thinks apart, and making no use of the organs of the body,
leaves no impressions on it, and consequently no memory of such
thoughts. Not to mention again the absurdity of two distinct persons,
which follows from this supposition, I answer, further,—That whatever
ideas the mind can receive and contemplate without the help of the
body, it is reasonable to conclude it can retain without the help of
the body too; or else the soul, or any separate spirit, will have but
little advantage by thinking. If it has no memory of its own thoughts;
if it cannot lay them up for its own use, and be able to recall them
upon occasion; if it cannot reflect upon what is past, and make use of
its former experiences, reasonings, and contemplations, to what purpose
does it think? They who make the soul a thinking thing, at this rate,
will not make it a much more noble being than those do whom they
condemn, for allowing it to be nothing but the subtilist parts of
matter. Characters drawn on dust, that the first breath of wind
effaces; or impressions made on a heap of atoms, or animal spirits, are
altogether as useful, and render the subject as noble, as the thoughts
of a soul that perish in thinking; that, once out of sight, are gone
for ever, and leave no memory of themselves behind them. Nature never
makes excellent things for mean or no uses: and it is hardly to be
conceived that our infinitely wise Creator should make so admirable a
faculty as the power of thinking, that faculty which comes nearest the
excellency of his own incomprehensible being, to be so idly and
uselessly employed, at least a fourth part of its time here, as to
think constantly, without remembering any of those thoughts, without
doing any good to itself or others, or being any way useful to any
other part of the creation. If we will examine it, we shall not find, I
suppose, the motion of dull and senseless matter, any where in the
universe, made so little use of and so wholly thrown away.
16. On this Hypothesis, the Soul must have Ideas not derived from
Sensation or Reflection, of which there is no Appearance.
It is true, we have sometimes instances of perception whilst we are
asleep, and retain the memory of those thoughts: but how extravagant
and incoherent for the most part they are; how little conformable to
the perfection and order of a rational being, those who are acquainted
with dreams need not be told. This I would willingly be satisfied
in,—whether the soul, when it thinks thus apart, and as it were
separate from the body, acts less rationally than when conjointly with
it, or no. If its separate thoughts be less rational, then these men
must say, that the soul owes the perfection of rational thinking to the
body: if it does not, it is a wonder that our dreams should be, for the
most part, so frivolous and irrational; and that the soul should retain
none of its more rational soliloquies and meditations.
17. If I think when I know it not, nobody else can know it.
Those who so confidently tell us that the soul always actually thinks,
I would they would also tell us, what those ideas are that are in the
soul of a child, before or just at the union with the body, before it
hath received any by sensation. The dreams of sleeping men are, as I
take it, all made up of the waking man’s ideas; though for the most
part oddly put together. It is strange, if the soul has ideas of its
own that it derived not from sensation or reflection, (as it must have,
if it thought before it received any impressions from the body,) that
it should never, in its private thinking, (so private, that the man
himself perceives it not,) retain any of them the very moment it wakes
out of them, and then make the man glad with new discoveries. Who can
find it reason that the soul should, in its retirement during sleep,
have so many hours’ thoughts, and yet never light on any of those ideas
it borrowed not from sensation or reflection; or at least preserve the
memory of none but such, which, being occasioned from the body, must
needs be less natural to a spirit? It is strange the soul should never
once in a man’s whole life recall over any of its pure native thoughts,
and those ideas it had before it borrowed anything from the body; never
bring into the waking man’s view any other ideas but what have a tang
of the cask, and manifestly derive their original from that union. If
it always thinks, and so had ideas before it was united, or before it
received any from the body, it is not to be supposed but that during
sleep it recollects its native ideas; and during that retirement from
communicating with the body, whilst it thinks by itself, the ideas it
is busied about should be, sometimes at least, those more natural and
congenial ones which it had in itself, underived from the body, or its
own operations about them: which, since the waking man never remembers,
we must from this hypothesis conclude either that the soul remembers
something that the man does not; or else that memory belongs only to
such ideas as are derived from the body, or the mind’s operations about
them.
18. How knows any one that the Soul always thinks? For if it be not a
self-evident Proposition, it needs Proof.
I would be glad also to learn from these men who so confidently
pronounce that the human soul, or, which is all one, that a man always
thinks, how they come to know it; nay, how they come to know that they
themselves think, when they themselves do not perceive it. This, I am
afraid, is to be sure without proofs, and to know without perceiving.
It is, I suspect, a confused notion, taken up to serve an hypothesis;
and none of those clear truths, that either their own evidence forces
us to admit, or common experience makes it impudence to deny. For the
most that can be said of it is, that it is possible the soul may always
think, but not always retain it in memory. And I say, it is as possible
that the soul may not always think; and much more probable that it
should sometimes not think, than that it should often think, and that a
long while together, and not be conscious to itself, the next moment
after, that it had thought.
19. That a Man should be busy in Thinking, and yet not retain it the
next moment, very improbable.
To suppose the soul to think, and the man not to perceive it, is, as
has been said, to make two persons in one man. And if one considers
well these men’s way of speaking, one should be led into a suspicion
that they do so. For those who tell us that the SOUL always thinks, do
never, that I remember, say that a MAN always thinks. Can the soul
think, and not the man? Or a man think, and not be conscious of it?
This, perhaps, would be suspected of jargon in others. If they say the
man thinks always, but is not always conscious of it, they may as well
say his body is extended without having parts. For it is altogether as
intelligible to say that a body is extended without parts, as that
anything thinks without being conscious of it, or perceiving that it
does so. They who talk thus may, with as much reason, if it be
necessary to their hypothesis, say that a man is always hungry, but
that he does not always feel it; whereas hunger consists in that very
sensation, as thinking consists in being conscious that one thinks. If
they say that a man is always conscious to himself of thinking, I ask,
How they know it? Consciousness is the perception of what passes in a
man’s own mind. Can another man perceive that I am conscious of
anything, when I perceive it not myself? No man’s knowledge here can go
beyond his experience. Wake a man out of a sound sleep, and ask him
what he was that moment thinking of. If he himself be conscious of
nothing he then thought on, he must be a notable diviner of thoughts
that can assure him that he was thinking. May he not, with more reason,
assure him he was not asleep? This is something beyond philosophy; and
it cannot be less than revelation, that discovers to another thoughts
in my mind, when I can find none there myself. And they must needs have
a penetrating sight who can certainly see that I think, when I cannot
perceive it myself, and when I declare that I do not; and yet can see
that dogs or elephants do not think, when they give all the
demonstration of it imaginable, except only telling us that they do so.
This some may suspect to be a step beyond the Rosicrucians; it seeming
easier to make one’s self invisible to others, than to make another’s
thoughts visible to me, which are not visible to himself. But it is but
defining the soul to be “a substance that always thinks,” and the
business is done. If such definition be of any authority, I know not
what it can serve for but to make many men suspect that they have no
souls at all; since they find a good part of their lives pass away
without thinking. For no definitions that I know, no suppositions of
any sect, are of force enough to destroy constant experience; and
perhaps it is the affectation of knowing beyond what we perceive, that
makes so much useless dispute and noise in the world.
20. No ideas but from Sensation and Reflection, evident, if we observe
Children.
I see no reason, therefore, to believe that the soul thinks before the
senses have furnished it with ideas to think on; and as those are
increased and retained, so it comes, by exercise, to improve its
faculty of thinking in the several parts of it; as well as, afterwards,
by compounding those ideas, and reflecting on its own operations, it
increases its stock, as well as facility in remembering, imagining,
reasoning, and other modes of thinking.
21. State of a child in the mother’s womb.
He that will suffer himself to be informed by observation and
experience, and not make his own hypothesis the rule of nature, will
find few signs of a soul accustomed to much thinking in a new-born
child, and much fewer of any reasoning at all. And yet it is hard to
imagine that the rational soul should think so much, and not reason at
all. And he that will consider that infants newly come into the world
spend the greatest part of their time in sleep, and are seldom awake
but when either hunger calls for the teat, or some pain (the most
importunate of all sensations), or some other violent impression on the
body, forces the mind to perceive and attend to it;—he, I say, who
considers this, will perhaps find reason to imagine that a Fœtus in the
mother’s womb differs not much from the state of a vegetable, but
passes the greatest part of its time without perception or thought;
doing very little but sleep in a place where it needs not seek for
food, and is surrounded with liquor, always equally soft, and near of
the same temper; where the eyes have no light, and the ears so shut up
are not very susceptible of sounds; and where there is little or no
variety, or change of objects, to move the senses.
22. The mind thinks in proportion to the matter it gets from experience
to think about.
Follow a child from its birth, and observe the alterations that time
makes, and you shall find, as the mind by the senses comes more and
more to be furnished with ideas, it comes to be more and more awake;
thinks more, the more it has matter to think on. After some time it
begins to know the objects which, being most familiar with it, have
made lasting impressions. Thus it comes by degrees to know the persons
it daily converses with, and distinguishes them from strangers; which
are instances and effects of its coming to retain and distinguish the
ideas the senses convey to it. And so we may observe how the mind, BY
DEGREES, improves in these; and ADVANCES to the exercise of those other
faculties of enlarging, compounding, and abstracting its ideas, and of
reasoning about them, and reflecting upon all these; of which I shall
have occasion to speak more hereafter.
23. A man begins to have ideas when he first has sensation. What
sensation is.
If it shall be demanded then, WHEN a man BEGINS to have any ideas, I
think the true answer is,—WHEN HE FIRST HAS ANY SENSATION. For, since
there appear not to be any ideas in the mind before the senses have
conveyed any in, I conceive that ideas in the understanding are coeval
with SENSATION; WHICH IS SUCH AN IMPRESSION OR MOTION MADE IN SOME PART
OF THE BODY, AS MAKES IT BE TAKEN NOTICE OF IN THE UNDERSTANDING.
24. The Original of all our Knowledge.
The impressions then that are made on our sense by outward objects that
are extrinsical to the mind; and its own operations about these
impressions, reflected on by itself, as proper objects to be
contemplated by it, are, I conceive, the original of all knowledge.
Thus the first capacity of human intellect is,—that the mind is fitted
to receive the impressions made on it; either through the senses by
outward objects, or by its own operations when it reflects on them.
This is the first step a man makes towards the discovery of anything,
and the groundwork whereon to build all those notions which ever he
shall have naturally in this world. All those sublime thoughts which
tower above the clouds, and reach as high as heaven itself, take their
rise and footing here: in all that great extent wherein the mind
wanders, in those remote speculations it may seem to be elevated with,
it stirs not one jot beyond those ideas which SENSE or REFLECTION have
offered for its contemplation.
25. In the Reception of simple Ideas, the Understanding is for the most
part passive.
In this part the understanding is merely passive; and whether or no it
will have these beginnings, and as it were materials of knowledge, is
not in its own power. For the objects of our senses do, many of them,
obtrude their particular ideas upon our minds whether we will or not;
and the operations of our minds will not let us be without, at least,
some obscure notions of them. No man can be wholly ignorant of what he
does when he thinks. These simple ideas, when offered to the mind, the
understanding can no more refuse to have, nor alter when they are
imprinted, nor blot them out and make new ones itself, than a mirror
can refuse, alter, or obliterate the images or ideas which the objects
set before it do therein produce. As the bodies that surround us do
diversely affect our organs, the mind is forced to receive the
impressions; and cannot avoid the perception of those ideas that are
annexed to them.