in THE ORIGIN OF THE IMPRESSIONS 99 



maladies, such as gout or gravel, are innate in others ; not 

 that children born in these families are troubled with such 

 diseases in their mother's womb; but because they are 

 born with the disposition or the faculty of contracting 

 them." * 



His troublesome disciple, Begins, having as- 

 serted that all our ideas come from observation or 

 tradition, Descartes remarks: 



" So thoroughly erroneous is this assertion, that whoever 

 has a proper comprehension of the action of our senses, 

 and understands precisely the nature of that which is trans- 

 mitted by them to our thinking faculty, will rather affirm 

 that no ideas of things, such as are formed in thought, are 

 brought to us by the senses, so that there is nothing in our 

 ideas which is other than innate in the mind (naturel d 

 V esprit), or in the faculty of thinking, if only certain cir- 

 cumstances are excepted, which belong only to experience. 

 For example, it is experience alone which causes us to 

 judge that such and such ideas, now present in our minds, 

 are related to certain things which are external to us ; not, 

 in truth, that they have been sent into our mind by these 

 things, such as they are, by the organs of the senses ; but 

 because these organs have transmitted something which has 

 occasioned the mind, in virtue of its innate power, to form 

 them at this time rather than at another 



" Nothing passes from external objects to the soul ex- 

 cept certain motions of matter (mouvemens corporels), but 

 neither these motions, nor the figures which they produce, 

 are conceived by us as they exist in the sensory organs, as 

 I have fully explained in my ' Dioptrics ' ; whence it fol- 

 lows that even the ideas of motion and of figures are in- 

 nate (naturellement en nous). And, d fortiori, the ideas of 



* Remarques de Rene Descartes sur un certain placard 

 im prime aux Pays Bas vers la fin de 1'annee, 1647. Des- 

 cartes, (Euvres. Ed. Cousin, x. p. 71. 

 150 



