Chapter 45 From "Comments on a Certain Broadsheet" Rene Descartes
In article twelve the author's disagreement with me seems to be merely verbal. When he says that the mind has no need of ideas, or notions, or axioms which are innate, while admitting that the mind has the power of thinking (presumably natural or innate), he is plainly saying the same thing as I, though verbally denying it.
I have never written or taken the view that the mind requires innate ideas which are something distinct from its own faculty of thinking. I did, however, observe that there were certain thoughts within me which neither came to me from external objects nor were determined by my will, but which came solely from the power of thinking within me; so I applied the term 'innate' to the ideas or notions which are the forms of these thoughts in order to distinguish them from others, which I called 'adventitious' or 'made up'. This is the same sense as that in which we say that generosity is 'innate' in certain families, or that certain diseases such as gout or stones are innate in others: it is not so much that the babies of such families suffer from these diseases in their mother's womb, but simply that they are bom with a certain 'faculty' or tendency to contract them.In article thirteen he draws an extraordinary conclusion from the preceding article. Because the mind has no need of innate ideas, its power of thinking being sufficient, he says, 'all common notions which are engraved in the mind have their origin in observation of things or in verbal instruction'—as if the power of thinking could achieve nothing on its own, could never perceive or think anything except what it receives through observation of things or through verbal instruction, Le., from the senses. But this is so far from being true that, on the contrary, if we bear well in mind the scope of our senses and what it is exactly that reaches our faculty of thinking by way of them, we must admit that in no case are the ideas of things presented to us by the senses just as we form them in our thinking.
So much so that there is nothing in our ideas which is not innate to the mind or the faculty of thinking, with the sole exception of those circumstances which relate to experience, such as the fact that we judge that this or that idea which we now have immediately before our mind refers to a certain thing situated outside us. We make such a judgement not because these things transmit the ideas to our mind through the sense organs, but because they transmit something which, at exactly that moment, gives the mind occasion to form these ideas by means of the faculty innate to it. Nothing reaches our mind from external objects through the sense organs except certain corporeal motions, as our author himself asserts in article nineteen, in accordance with my own principles. But neither the motions themselves nor the figures arising from them are conceived by us exactly as they occur in the sense organs, as I have explained at length in my Optics. Hence it follows that the very ideas of the motions themselves and of the figures are innate in us. The ideas of pain, colours, sounds and the like must be all the more innate if, on the occasion of certain corporeal motions, our mind is to be capable of representing them to itself, for there is no similarity between these ideas and the corporeal motions. Is it possible to imagine anything more absurd than that all the common notions within our mind arise from such motions and cannot exist without them? I would like our author to tell me what the corporeal motion is that is capable of forming some common notion to the effect that 'things which are equal to a third thing are equal to each other,, or any other he cares to take. For all such motions are particular, whereas the common notions are universal and bear no affinity with, or relation to, the motions.... It is surely obvious to everyone that, strictly speaking, sight in itself presents nothing but pictures, and hearing nothing but utterances and sounds.
So everything over and above these utterances and pictures which we think of as being signified by them is represented to us by means of ideas which come to us from no other source than our own faculty of thinking. Consequently these ideas, along with that faculty, are innate in us, i.e., they always exist within us potentially, for to exist in some faculty is not to exist actually, but merely potentially, since the term 'faculty' denotes nothing but a potentiality. But no one can assert that we can know nothing of God other than his name or the corporeal image which artists give him, unless he is prepared openly to admit that he is an atheist and indeed totally lacking in intellect.... Later on, in enumerating the forms of perception, he lists only sense-perception, memory, and imagination. We may gather from this that he does not admit any pure understanding, Le., understanding which is not concerned with any corporeal images, and hence that his view is that we have no knowledge of God, or of the human mind, or of other incorporeal things. The only explanation for this that I can think of is that what thoughts he has on these matters are so confused that he is never aware of having a pure thought, a thought which is quite distinct from any corporeal image.
... By 'innate ideas' I have never meant anything other than what the author himself explicitly asserts to be true, υiz. that 'there is present in us a natural power which enables us to know God'. But I have never written or even thought that such ideas are actual, or that they are some sort of 'forms' which are distinct from our faculty of thinking. Indeed, there is no one more opposed than I to the useless lumber of scholastic entities; so much so that I could hardly keep from laughing when I saw the enormous battalion of arguments which the gentleman had painstakingly mustered—quite without malice, no doubt—to prove that babies have no actual conception of God while they are in their mother's womb'—as if he were thereby mounting a devastating assault upon me.