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