re distracted with. But, in truth, were there any such innate
principles there would be no need to teach them. Did men find such
innate propositions stamped on their minds, they would easily be able
to distinguish them from other truths that they afterwards learned and
deduced from them; and there would be nothing more easy than to know
what, and how many, they were. There could be no more doubt about their
number than there is about the number of our fingers; and it is like
then every system would be ready to give them us by tale. But since
nobody, that I know, has ventured yet to give a catalogue of them, they
cannot blame those who doubt of these innate principles; since even they
who require men to believe that there are such innate propositions, do
not tell us what they are. It is easy to foresee, that if different men
of different sects should go about to give us a list of those innate
practical principles, they would set down only such as suited their
distinct hypotheses, and were fit to support the doctrines of their
particular schools or churches; a plain evidence that there are no such
innate truths. Nay, a great part of men are so far from finding any
such innate moral principles in themselves, that, by denying freedom to
mankind, and thereby making men no other than bare machines, they take
away not only innate, but all moral rules whatsoever, and leave not
a possibility to believe any such, to those who cannot conceive how
anything can be capable of a law that is not a free agent. And upon that
ground they must necessarily reject all principles of virtue, who cannot
put MORALITY and MECHANISM together, which are not very easy to be
reconciled or made consistent.

15. Lord Herbert's innate Principles examined.

When I had written this, being informed that my Lord Herbert had, in
his book De Veritate, assigned these innate principles, I presently
consulted him, hoping to find in a man of so great parts, something that
might satisfy me in this point, and put an end to my inquiry. In his
chapter De Instinctu Naturali, I met with these six marks of his
Notitice Communes:--1. Prioritas. 2. Independentia. 3. Universalitas. 4.
Certitudo. 5. Necessitas, i. e. as he explains it, faciunt ad hominis
conservationem. 6. Modus conformationis, i.e. Assensus nulla interposita
mora. And at the latter end of his little treatise De Religione Laici,
he says this of these innate principles: Adeo ut non uniuscujusvis
religioni