INNATE IDEAS, in epistemology and in metaphysics, are ideas as of right, wrong, free dom, immortality, and of God, supposed by some to inhere in the mind, in which case they are opposed to acquired ideas, and synonymous with inborn or inherited ideas. But innate has also another meaning. Not infrequently it is understood as synonymous with natural, essen tial, necessary, abstract, pure, a priori, trans cendental, or with universal. In the sense of inborn, innate conveys a notion of something temporal. At the outset of this article, it may be admitted, without hesitation, that no inborn ideas exist at all. But likewise, it must be granted that innate ideas, as synonymous with the Kantian a priori as of God, etc., not only exist, but they have both objective validity and are among the most certain cognitions grasped by the mind of man. For the formal sciences, pure mathematics, logic and pure natural sci ence, are not inborn or inherited, but yet are most certainly a priori, and therefore innate in one (the legitimate second' sense) of the word. The term innate as applied to ideas was not, as some say, first employed by the phi losopher Descartes. Long before his works appeared, innate, as applied apparently to inborn ideas, was in common use in England, and it is to be found in a poem of Sir John Davis, published four years before Descartes was born. The title of this poem tells us expressly that there are innate ideas in the soul. Then with the taunting question put to Descartes the ques tion of innate ideas enters modern philosophy. The prevailing misapprehension with respect to the doctrine usually ascribed to this philosopher can only be accounted for by supposing that the opinions of Descartes have been more fre quently judged from glosses of his nominal followers than from his own works. Among those who seem to have misunderstood Des cartes was the lively but superficial philosopher Voltaire. As Descartes not only has been mis understood by Voltaire, but also by a number of others, it may not be amiss to quote him (as the passage in which his elucidation of his conception occurs is very rare), and let the reader judge for himself.
°When I said that the idea of God is innate in us, I never meant more than this, that Nature has endowed us with a faculty by which we may know God; but I have never either said or thought that such ideas had an actual existence, or even that they were species dis tinct from the faculty of thinking. I will even
go further, and assert that nobody has kept at a greater distance than myself from all this trash of scholastic entities, in so much that I could not help smiling when I read of the numerous arguments which Regius has so in dustriously collected to show that infants have no actual knowledge of God while they remain as yet unborn. Although the idea of God is so imprinted on our minds, that every person has within himself the faculty of knowing God, it does not follow that there may not have been various individuals who have passed through life without making this idea a distinct object of apprehension, and in truth, they who think they have an idea of a plurality of Gods, have no idea of God whatever.° ((Cortesii, Pars. I, Epist. xcix). For Voltaire's misrep resentation of this idea of Descartes the reader may turn to Voltaire's °Letter 13,° in his 'Let ters on the English Nation.' A number of Dutch divines whose opinions differed widely from those of Descartes, found it convenient to shelter their solemn nonsense under his estab lished name. No doubt some of Voltaire's strictures might have found an application there. It is probable too, as Hume says, that no more was meant by those who denied innate ideas than that all ideas were copies of our impressions. Dr. Cudworth, who felt that there are some ideas of the mind not stamped upon it from sensible objects without, and therefore which arise from the innate vigor and activity of the mind, enumerates a rather complete group of such innate ideas. He divides them as follows into two groups: (1) Ideas of wis dom, folly, prudence, imprudence, knowledge, ignorance, verity, falsity, virtue, vice, honesty, dishonesty, justice, injustice, volition, cognition, he says °of sense itself° as a species of cognition, and which is not perceptible as an idea by any sense. (2) Ideas of cause, effect, means, end, order, proportion, similitude, dis similitude, equality, inequality, aptitude. inapti tude, symmetry, asymmetry, whole, part, genus, species, and the like.