368 NEW ESSAYS 



of acquired habits and of the things stored in our memory, 

 and, indeed, they do not always come to our aid when 

 we require them, although we often bring them back 

 easily into our mind on some slight occasion which recalls 

 them to us, as we need only the beginning of a song in 

 order to remember it 45 . Our author also limits his 

 thesis in other places, saying that there is in us nothing 

 of which we have not at least been conscious [aper$us\ 

 formerly. But in addition to the fact that nobody can, 

 through reason alone, be quite certain how far our past 

 apperceptions have extended, for we may have forgotten 

 them, especially in light of the Platonic doctrine of 

 reminiscence, which, though a myth 46 , contains, in part 

 at least 47 , nothing incompatible with bare reason in 

 addition, I say, to this fact, why must everything be 

 acquired by us through apperception of external things, 

 and why should it be impossible to unearth anything in 



45 E. reads ' to make us remember the rest of it/ 



46 Leibniz's objection to the Platonic doctrine is that it implies 

 a complete (or clear and distinct) knowledge of the ' ideas ' in 

 a previous state. He accepts the Platonic doctrine in so far as it 

 implies that knowledge of the eternally true comes to the soul not 

 through external sense, but by development from its own inner 

 being. Cf. Nouveaux Essais, bk. i. ch. i, 5 (E. 209 a ; Gr. v. 75 : l It 

 was the opinion of the Platonists that all our ideas [connaissances~\ 

 were reminiscences, and that thus the truths which the soul brings 

 with it at a man's birth, and which are called innate, must be 

 remains of a former definite knowledge. But this opinion has no 

 foundation. And we may readily believe that the soul must have 

 already had innate ideas [connaissances] in its preceding state (if it 

 did pre-exist), however far back that state might be, just as it has 

 them now ; accordingly they must in turn have come from another 

 preceding state, in which they would ultimately be innate, or at 

 least created along with it ; or else we should have to go ad infinitum 

 and regard souls as eternal, in which case these ideas [connaissances] 

 would in fact be innate, because they would never have had a 

 beginning in the soul ; and if any one maintains that each prior 

 state has received from another, prior to itself, something which it 

 has not transmitted to those which follow, the answer is that it is 

 manifest that certain evident truths must have belonged to all 

 these states.' 



47 E. omits ' in part at least.' 



