I 



98 HUME m 



taken in a very loose sense by Locke and others, as stand- 

 ing for any of our perceptions, our sensations and passions, 

 as well as thoughts. Now in this sense I should desire to 

 know what can be meant by asserting that self-love, or re- 

 sentment of injuries, or the passion between the sexes is 

 not innate ? 



" But admitting these terms, impressions and ideas, in the 

 sense above explained, and understanding by innate what is 

 original or copied from no precedent perception, then we 

 may assert that all our impressions are innate, and our 

 ideas not innate." 



It would seem that Hume did not think it 

 worth while to acquire a comprehension of the 

 real points at issue in the controversy which he 

 thus carelessly dismisses. 



Yet Descartes has defined what he means by 

 innate ideas with so much precision, that miscon- 

 ception ought to have been impossible. He says 

 that, when he speaks of an idea being "innate," 

 he means that it exists potentially in the mind, 

 before it is actually called into existence by what- 

 ever is its appropriate exciting cause. 



" I have never either thought or said," he writes, " that 

 the mind has any need of innate ideas \idees naturelles] 

 which are anything distinct from its faculty of thinking. 

 But it is true that observing that there are certain thoughts 

 which arise neither from external objects nor from the de- 

 termination of my will, but only from my faculty of think- 

 ing ; in order to mark the difference between the ideas or 

 the notions which are the forms of these thoughts, and to 

 distinguish them from the others, which may be called ex- 

 traneous or voluntary, I have called them innate. But I 

 have used this term in the same sense as when we say that 

 generosity is innate in certain families; or that certain 



