Ill THE ORIGIN OF THE IMPRESSIONS 99 



stands precisely the nature of that which is transmitted 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 A I'esprit), or in the faculty of thinking, 

 if only certain circumstances 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 except 

 certain motions of matter (mouvemens corporels), but neither 

 these motions, nor the figures which they produce, are con- 

 ceived by us as they exist in the sensory organs, as I have fully 

 explained in my ' Dioptrics ' ; whence it follows that even the 

 ideas of motion and of figures are innate (naturellement en nous). 

 And, d, fortiori, the ideas of pain, of colours, of sounds, and of 

 all similar things must be innate, in order that the mind may 

 represent them to itself, on the occasion of certain motions of 

 matter with which they have no resemblance. " 



Whoever denies what is, in fact, an inconceivable 

 proposition, that sensations pass, as such, from the 

 external world into the mind, must admit the 

 conclusion here laid down by Descartes, that, 

 strictly speaking, sensations, and a fortiori, all the 

 other contents of the mind, are innate. Or, to 

 state the matter in accordance with the views 

 previously expounded, that they are products of 

 the inherent properties of the thinking organ, in 

 which they lie potentially, before they are called 

 into existence by their appropriate causes. 



H 2 



