INNATE IDEAS, ideas or intellectual functions which are supposed to be inborn in, or native to, the human mind, as dis tinguished from those which are "acquired" in the course of experience, or are constructed by the mind on the analogy of experienced objects. The existence of innate ideas formed the subject of acute controversy in the 17th century. Herbert of Cherbury maintained the innate character of certain "common notions," such as substance, equality, etc., and axioms or "eternal truths" like "things equal to the same thing are equal to one another." Descartes likewise upheld the innate status of such ideas as those of God, substance, unity, equality, etc., and of vari ous axioms of geometry, etc. Locke, on the other hand, denies the existence of innate ideas, and expressed his adhesion to the Aristotelian principle that all ideas are derived, directly or indi rectly, from sense-experience—nihil est in intellectu quod non pries fuerit in sensu. He tried to refute Descartes by contend ing, as he well might, that there is no evidence for the existence of any full-fledged ideas in the minds of new-born infants, and that even savages are deficient in many of the ideas which Des cartes considered to be innate in the human mind. Locke, how ever, had really misunderstood Descartes, who did not maintain that innate ideas are explicit in the human mind from birth, but only that there are in man certain tendencies to construct and apply certain ideas when occasion arises.
Man, as Leibnitz urged against Locke, is after all endowed from birth with an intellect so constituted as to function in certain ways in due course—nihil est in intellectu . . . excipe nisi ipse intellectus. Nobody now shares Locke's view that the human mind at birth is a tabula rasa, a blank tablet waiting passively to receive the impressions of the senses. All admit nowadays, in deed emphasize, the existence of certain native tendencies and endowments in the individual mind from birth or even sooner. But the views about their nature or previous history are various. Confining ourselves to such fundamental ideas as the so-called categories (substance, attribute, cause, effect, etc.) there is, on the one hand. the a priori view usually associated with the name of Kant (really much older), namely, that they are functionally inherent in the very structure of the mind, and are not derived from experience, because experience itself would be impossible without them. On the other hand, there is the empirical, evolu tionary view put forward by H. Spencer, that although such ideas could not have evolved in the limited life-time of an individual, but are hereditary and so native in a sense, yet they may have been acquired from experience in the course of the vast period of the evolution of the human race. (See CATEGORY, DESCARTES, KANT, LEIBNITZ.) (A. Wo.)