APPENDIX. 



NOTE TO TWELFTH LECTURE. 



The conditions under which the Lectures were delivered, made it 

 difficult, if not impossible, to consider the arguments that have been 

 urged against the possession of religious instincts by man, from the 

 time of Locke's war against innate ideas to the present day. A few 

 points from various writers, may enable us to give the doctrine here 

 announced, a fairer presentation, than has been made in the Lec- 

 ture. 



It is not contended, that these instincts or their products, exist 

 in man naturally, in any such sense as the " inflate ideas " were 

 supposed to exist, — the doctrine of which Locke opposed. What his 

 notion was of that innate idea of God, which he denied the existence 

 of, he informs us, B. i. ch. iv., § 17. — " If God had set any impres- 

 sion and character on the understanding of men, it is most reason- 

 able to expect it should have been some clear and uniform idea of 

 Himself, as far as our weak capabilities were capable to receive so 

 incomprehensible and infinite object." 



Such an idea of God, which should give to man, or be to man, all 

 the knowledge of God which he is capable of securing, no one, cer- 

 tainly, at the present day, would believe to be innate. 



What we intend to teach, is that the nature of man is such, that 

 in its developments, the religious instincts which we have mentioned, 

 arise as naturally and as necessarily, as impulses, and cojiditions of 

 progress in the true knowledge of God and of our relations to him, as 

 the animal instincts arise at certain times, as the condition of growth 

 in knowledge by experience. A child may die so young that not 

 one of Its appetites, desires or instincts, ever comes into play, that we 

 know of. Do we on that account say, that such a child had none of 

 them .' We may say that, because none of them had come into ac- 



