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