ESSAY IV. 381 and may be called the implanting or instamping these ideas upon the mind ; since no manner of corporeal motions can have any necessary and effectual influence of themselves to excite these perceptions in the mind, because it is a being incorporeal, intangible and immoveable. And indeed this sort of innate ideas, and in this sense, Mr. Locke himself seems to own, book II. chap. 8. §. 13. SECT. III. In what Sense some Truths may be innate. SECONDLY, as these ideas may in this sense be called innate, so some principles of knowledge, (though not explicit propositions) may be in a sense innate also. It is fully granted that such axioms as these, " Whatsoever acteth bath a being, the whole is greater than a part, nothing can be the causeof it- self, &c. are not actually inscribed on the mind of man in its first formation; yet the very nature, make and frame of a ra- tional mind is such that it cannot but judge according to such axioms as these ; and whatsoever particular judgments or pro- positions it forms (though it does not deduce them from such ex- plicit general axioms written within itself, yet) it always judges and reasons according to these axioms, and cannot judge con- trary to them : They are so interwoven, with the very constitu- tion and nature of a reasoning being, that they are the constant principles of all its assent or dissent in particular enquiries : And in this sense perhaps they may be called innate. They are, (as Mr. Glanvil calls them in his Vanity of Dogmatizing, 8, p. 81.) " The very essentials of rationality ; and if any ask how the soul came by them, I return, as quantity did by length, breadth end depth. To determine how great is the number of these propositions is impossible, for they are not in the soul as propositions ; but it is an undoubted truth, that a mind awaking out of nothing into being, and presented with particular objects, would not fail at once to judge°concerning them, according to and by the force of some such innate principles as these, or just as a man would judge who had learnt these explicit propositions, which indeed are so nearly allied to its own nature, that they may be called almost a part of itself ; they are in some sense the very nature of the mind considered as judging or as reasoning, nor is it possible for a reasoning faculty to exist without them. Therefore I take the mind or soul of man not to be so per- fectly indifferent to receive all impressions, as a rasa tabula, or white paper ; and it is so framed by its maker as not to be equally disposed to all sorts of perceptions, nor to embrace all proposi- lions, with an indifference to judge them true or false; but that antecedently to all the effects of custom, experience, education, or any other contingent causes, as the mind is necessarily ordain-
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