98 HUME 



III 



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 determination of my 

 will, but only from my faculty of thinking ; 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 extraneous 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 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." J 



His troublesome disciple, Regius, having asserted 

 that all our ideas come from observation or tradi- 

 tion, Descartes remarks : 



' ' So thoroughly erroneous is this assertion, that whoever has 

 a proper comprehension of the action of our senses, and under- 



1 Remarques de Rene Descartes sur un certain placard im- 

 prime aux Pays Bas vers la fin de 1'annee, 1647. Descartes, 

 (Eumes. Ed. Cousin, x. p. 71. 



