366 NEW ESSAYS 



of supplying what is lacking in those which were not 

 trustworthy, by stating the exceptions to them, and in 

 short of finding sure connexions in the force of necessary 

 consequences ; and this often enables us to foresee the 

 event without having to experience the sense-connexions 

 of images, to which the animals are confined, so that 

 that which shows that the sources [principes] of necessary 

 truths are within us also distinguishes man from the 

 lower animals. 



Perhaps our able author may not entirely diifer from 

 me in opinion. For after having devoted the whole of 

 his first book to the rejection of innate knowledge 

 [lumieres\ understood in a certain sense, he nevertheless 

 admits, at the beginning of the second book and in those 

 which follow, that the ideas which do not originate in 

 sensation come from reflexion. Now reflexion is nothing 

 but an attention to that which is in us, and the senses 

 do not give us what we already bring with us. That 

 being so, can it be denied that there is much that is 

 innate in our mind [esprit], since we are, so to speak, 

 innate to ourselves, and since in ourselves there are 

 being, unity, substance, duration, change, activity [action^ 

 perception, pleasure and a thousand other objects of our 

 intellectual ideas 40 ? And as these objects are immediate 

 objects of our understanding and are always present 41 

 (although they cannot always be consciously perceived 

 [aperpus] because of our distractions and wants), why 

 should it be surprising that we say that these ideas, 

 along with all that depends on them, are innate in us ? 

 Accordingly I have taken as illustration a block of veined 



40 As distinguished from ideas or images of sense. Cf. Monadology, 

 30, and Principles of Nature and of Grace, 5 ; also Petit discours de 

 Metaphysique (1686) (G-. iv. 452) : 'Those expressions which are in 

 our soul, whether they are conceived or not, may be called ideas, but 

 those which are conceived or formed may be said to be notions, 

 conceptus.' 



41 E. reads ' these objects are immediate and always present to 

 our understanding/ 



